Dáil debates

Tuesday, 18 October 2016

2:50 pm

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

The only groups of workers who have balloted on this issue are the ASTI and the Garda representative unions.

The Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland, ASTI, and the gardaí have democratically made a decision and, I suspect, if it was put to the rank and file of the Teachers Union of Ireland, TUI, the Irish National Teachers' Organisation, INTO, and to the nurses, we might have a different response. The young teachers at that rally were not political or radical people. There were just young teachers and they have thought about this deeply. They do not want to be on strike but they are raging about the question of inequality. The Taoiseach referenced figures of increases, with which I am well familiar, but they are not equality. That is the point. It was clear from those young teachers that they want equality. I asked the Taoiseach if he accepted that this pay inequality, pay apartheid and discrimination against young people coming into this profession simply because they happen to come into it after 2011 is unacceptable and if he accepted that it must be done away with. That is what they believe. It is pay apartheid. The scale of it is such that even with the increases the Taoiseach's is proposing, teachers who came into the profession after 2011 will earn about €160,000 less over their lifetimes. That is a very significant chunk of what it would cost to put a roof over their heads over the course of their lifetimes, even with the Taoiseach's proposed changes. Will he commit to equality? That is the question. Will he acknowledge that the teachers, the gardaí and any other group who choose to fight for equality and, if necessary, take industrial action to achieve it are right to pursue the principle of equality?

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