School conditions - Our children deserve to be protected

THE possibility of another strike

At their annual conference in Bundoran, delegates from the Irish National Teachers Organisation will demand that the Government embark on a €1.5 billion programme to upgrade and replace existing schools over the next five years.

It is a demand which is not unwarranted, and the appalling conditions about which the teachers rightly complain, have been well-documented in recent months.

The president of the 23,000-strong union, Gerry Malone, re-iterated the list of intolerable conditions in which they have to teach, and young children are educated. It includes overcrowded schools, rundown prefabs, leaking roofs, dangerous playgrounds and rotting windows. It is completely unacceptable that such conditions exist in schools in one of the richest countries in Europe.

The Government, and specifically Minister for Education Noel Dempsey, have made much of the fact that a €343 million school building programme was announced last January. It is a drop in the ocean as far as the overall problems that affect our primary schools are concerned.

Neither is it sufficient to aver that the legacy of generations from which the primary school system is suffering can be rectified in the short-term, because Fianna Fáil was in government for most of those generations.

During the decades involved, the rot was all too evident, yet only patchwork solutions were provided by way of prefabricated buildings to postpone the inevitable financial investment vital to make some of those schools habitable.

There seems to be no shortage of funds when it comes to supplying fleets of jets and cars for Government ministers and their officials, but there is nothing other than empty promises when it comes to problems that impinge on the health and education of our children.

With the objective of concentrating the mind of the Government on the conditions in the schools, the INTO executive will be asked to call a one-day strike before the end of next month, and to intensify the campaign if the issue is not resolved by the start of the next school year in September.

Apart from intolerable conditions, in many cases, teachers and especially principals, are also distracted from the job of teaching by the mountain of paperwork imposed on them under recent education legislation.

This situation is a potential source of a work-to-rule action if it continues to interfere with their teaching.