Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

There may be other references in the Bill to the same idea but it states in this section that "A person (including the Council) may make a complaint to the Investigating Committee in relation to a registered teacher, and the Committee may consider the complaint, where that complaint concerns any of the following matters in relation to the registered teacher". There then follows a series of cases, one of which is "that he or she has engaged in conduct contrary to a code of professional conduct established by the Council under section 7(2)(b)". I am reassured and, more to the point, teachers will be reassured by the Minister's earlier assurances that she would never dream of invoking any of this in the context of an industrial dispute but I wonder if there are legal grounds on which some other Minister might invoke this provision. If teachers were engaged in a legitimate industrial dispute could a Minister have the teachers deregistered because they were not doing as he or she had told them?