‘We will topple Government’ over two-tier pay

A war that will bring down the Government was promised by the leader of the country’s 35,000 primary teachers if they are unhappy with the outcome of imminent talks about lower-paid teachers.

Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) president John Boyle’s threat was issued after more than a dozen of his members who started teaching after 2010 detailed lost mortgage deposits, lost wedding funds and other financial losses incurred because of the two-tier pay system imposed on them.

The 800 delegates at INTO’s annual congress in Killarney unanimously passed the motion that was being simultaneously carried at the two other teacher conferences in Cork and Wexford, prompting Mr Boyle’s clear message to Education Minister Richard Bruton and his colleagues.

The move by the unions means they can ballot members to back industrial action up to strikes if talks on the pay of post-2010 entrants to the profession are not resolved by early May.

The INTO president told members he has every confidence in the union’s officials and his successor Joe Killeen getting every cent they can from the Government in those talks, the outcome of which would be put to them in a full ballot.

“If it’s not the right package, I sincerely hope that if you vote No that you know what you are doing,” said Mr Boyle.

You are going to war with this Government and we will topple this Government if we have to in order to make sure that 60,000 of their employees are treated fairly and that future governments never go next, nigh or near pay equality.

Yesterday morning, Education Minister Richard Bruton was treated to a mostly silent protest, interrupted occasionally by some heckling on the pay equality issue, during a 30-minute address to the conference.

Slogans like “1 Job, 1 Employer, 1 Payscale” and “I’ve worked the equivalent of >180 days for free” were on placards held aloft for the duration of the address in a packed hall.

He received applause from INTO delegates when he said the union had a “justifiable demand” to see more progress on the pay of newer entrants to the job.

But asked later by reporters if this meant he now agrees with the concept of equal pay for equal work, he said he meant teachers’ demands were one of a series of legitimate demands from different spheres for a share of any extra funding from his department.

“The trade unions have continued to press this issue which I recognised. And the Government has, under this pay round, set up a process under which this will be examined,” he said.

“From April 27, there will be... engagement on that with the trade unions. So I think this represents a response from Government, and clearly we want to make progress in this area,” said Mr Bruton.

He said pay restoration he has negotiated to date has seen around 75% of the pay gap closed for lower-paid teachers (LPTs), the most recent part of which was paid last January.

But INTO Curragh branch delegate Peter O’Toole told the afternoon debate that the last increase brought some LPTs above the threshold that had been qualifying them for the family income supplement.

“Some people are now earning less than what they were in January, so sometimes small gains amount to losses,” said Mr O’Toole, who qualified to teach in 2012.

“The Government has been kicking the can down the road for seven years now, they need to pick it up and do something about it,” he said.

While many delegates pointed upward at Government, one LPT told colleagues that she and many counterparts would be watching carefully if positive words at conferences are not matched with positive action in any ballot. Dublin West delegate Komeera Pillay said she is one of the two-thirds of teachers at her school who are lower-paid after four others left for work in sunnier and better-paid countries.

“Of the 20 LPTs left, collectively we have lost just over €300,000 and we have worked [the equivalent of] 10 years for free, simply because we graduated during a financial emergency that was not of our making and that we are no longer in,” she said.

Tomás O’Reilly, a Roscommon delegate who qualified in 2013, said his fiancée is also an LPT and they have lost around €30,000 each in the last four or five years.

“Take a bit of tax out of that and you’d have some craic at a wedding with that €40,000,” he said.

He and most of the 21 speakers on the motion were LPTs, many of them attending their first union conference.

Joe McKeown, a member of INTO’s central executive committee, told delegates and the majority of the 21 other speakers who were LPTs that the issue will be resolved either by consultation or by confrontation.

“It’s our preference to end it by consultation but if industrial action is required, the CEC will recommend it and teachers around the country will support it,” he said.