Critic of ASTI leadership aiming to become union president

A CONTROVERSIAL critic of the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland’s (ASTI) leadership is seeking to become its president less than a year after tendering his resignation from the union.

Bernard Lynch, a teacher at Marian College in Dublin 4, led opposition to the ASTI’s return to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) last year and has strongly rejected its participation in national pay deals.

He resigned from the union’s top-level 23-member standing committee last December, describing the appointment of a non-member as the ASTI deputy general secretary as the last straw.