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.

But the union’s president at the time, Sheila Parsons, did not process his resignation and asked him to reconsider the decision.

He has recently been elected to the ASTI 180-member central executive and has written to the 56 branches seeking nomination to become vice-president at the union’s annual convention next Easter, a position which would see him become president in 2008. Less than a year ago, he was considering the possibility of setting up a new teachers’ union.

“I have been a very vocal critic of the ASTI and this is a big challenge for me. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to teachers about the alternatives but I decided the best way to fight was from the inside,” Mr Lynch said.

“I’ve written to branches, telling them I’ve been a very hard working member of the ASTI, even when I felt the union was not doing its best for members,” he said.

Mr Lynch took the union to the High Court in 2001 after being refused attendance at meetings of the standing committee of which he was then a member because of his alleged disruption of proceedings.

The matter was settled but further controversy ensued when it was decided in 2004 that the union should pay his €76,000 legal costs.

Mr Lynch was among those who questioned former general secretary Charlie Lennon’s handling of the ASTI’s pay campaign that involved a series of strikes and school closures five years ago.

He remains opposed to the ASTI’s membership of the ICTU and suggested last night that members would be better represented negotiating their pay and conditions outside the national pay talks.

“There are a number of changes down the line for teachers on in-service training, school inspections and parent-teacher meetings and members may soon change their minds about these pay deals,” Mr Lynch said.