TALKBACK:One expects more serious analysis and leadership at a time of national crisis

WHAT IS it about the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI)) that drives it to engage in futile bouts of self destruction? Unlike their more astute colleagues in other unions, the TUI has failed dismally to communicate to their members how successful their own officers have been in protecting their current teachers salary scales against further attacks until after 2014, in the negotiations which led to the Croke Park agreement. The TUI was all over the place on the deal; criticising it only hours after helping to negotiate it. It then advised members to reject it which they duly did.

In another U-turn the union had a re-ballot earlier this year after threats from the Department of Education that surplus staff could be sacked. The result? The deal was endorsed with a healthy majority.

Why did the TUI make such a mess of the whole thing when it was evident from day one, that Croke Park was the only game in town? One might have thought that they would have learnt from that debacle, and used their conference last week to engage in serious debate about the key educational issues facing us in our present crisis.

Instead, the TUI had a cut at the €100 State support for private fee-paying schools.

Essentially, it argued that this money used to pay teachers in these 56 schools should not be paid by the taxpayer – a bizarre argument for any union to advance.

One expects more serious analysis and leadership in this time of national crisis, from a body representing third-level graduates – and one whose members are responsible for shaping the minds of hundreds of thousands of our children and young adults.

When Donagh O’Malley introduced so-called “free education” in 1966, schools were faced with three choices. Stay outside of the scheme and charge the same fees as before to fund the level of services the school traditionally provided, accept the State’s money and live within it, or take the State’s money and levy the balance of the original fee in the form of the now-famous “voluntary contribution”.

Ten per cent of schools decided to forgo the State money, even though they as parents were paying substantial amounts of taxation to fund the education system. In doing so, these schools left in the State coffers a substantial sum of capitation funding.

The vast majority of schools signed up for the scheme as offered in 1966, and continue to this day to levy “supplementary fees” under the guise of “voluntary contributions”. This system of supplementary funding, which is absolutely essential for the delivery of a quality of education that parents expect and demand, is the bedrock of education system at both the first and second level.

For the TUI to suggest that the State should stop paying the salaries of those teachers in fee- paying schools – where parents decided in 1966 to forgo their perfect entitlement to capitation payments – is rabble-rousing nonsense, and not worthy of a body representing teachers.

Those parents, who are exercising their democratic right by sending their children to “fee- paying” schools, are all paying substantial tax contributions into the State’s coffers.

They have every entitlement to expect the State will continue to use those tax revenue to pay the salaries of their children’s teachers.

Brian Mooney teaches at Oatlands College , Dublin