PERCEPTIONS are as important as realities when it comes to evaluating pay deals. In recent weeks, the teachers £67 million deal has been described by one commentator as a "lesson in daylight robbery", where the Department of Education has capitulated to three of the most powerful trade unions in the State.

Yet there is dissent among activists within the two secondary teaching unions. And only the INTO has given a strong recommendation to its members, without apparent signs of dissent, to accept the deal.

The TUI has also recommended acceptance of the deal, but the president of its Dublin branch has pledged to campaign against it.

The country's 26,000 nurses, meanwhile, yesterday delivered a resounding rejection of a £20 million pay deal. Some might wonder how they have not been offered a package along the lines being considered by the teachers.

The fact that their deal is estimated to cost £67 million seems to suggest that the teachers have been offered a pot of gold.

But the fact that they are the single largest homogeneous group when it comes to pay negotiations in the public service and that their existing annual pay bills amounts to around £1,200 million may put the deal into perspective.

Officials at the Department of Finance estimate that the deal will cost no more than 3 per cent extra during the lifetime of the present national pay agreement and just under 5.5 per cent by 1999, when it is implemented in full.

THE teachers deal has been cleverly constructed. The various aspects of the package covering early retirement, increased allowances, new promotional posts, the removal of one point on the existing 18 point pay scale etc are to be introduced over more than 10 different stages from July 1994 to September 1998.

The deal has been negotiated under the so called "restructuring" clause of the PCW. This same clause was included in its predecessor, the PESP, with provision for payments in the public service from 1993 onwards, but was carried forward into the present agreement as negotiations stalled.

So, effectively, many of the increases now being offered to the teachers have been carried over by three years, while the vast majority of workers in the private sector received a 3 per cent restructuring pay rise, in addition to the basic terms of the PESP, three and four years ago.

This restructuring clause is a significant departure from old style pay negotiations when teachers pushed their case solely on how they compare with other groups of workers, such as senior civil servants and bank officials.

For the first time, the teachers have been required to concede significant changes in working conditions in return for pay and pensions improvements.

At last year's Easter conferences, members of both the ASTI and the TUI warned their officials that there could be no worsening of their working conditions.

But these restructuring negotiations specifically require changes in working conditions. It was made clear in the PCW that the alternative to these restructuring talks would be to enter a traditional pay claim where the maximum that could be received would be 3 per cent.

The restructuring clause, by contrast, offered the prospect of a larger pay rise but also required - the conceding of changes in working conditions.

The changes asked of the teachers appear minimal, particularly a commitment to work 15 extra hours a year on non teaching activities and to cover absent colleagues.

But the key change will be the appointment to the new promotional posts on the basis of open competition, rather than by seniority in post primary schools. A new OECD study shows that Irish secondary schools are the most autonomous of those in 14 countries surveyed and rank second at primary level.

This only serves to emphasise the need to appoint the best teachers to the top management posts. The decline in the numbers of religious orders managing schools also means that the best lay teachers will have to be appointed in their place.

CONTRASTS will be made between the £67 million offer to the teachers and £20 million deal just rejected by the nurses which represented an increase of around 5 per cent.

But even crude arithmetic shows that a large part of the difference can be explained by the differences in the numbers of workers involved, it is widely expected that further efforts will be made to revive the nurses pay negotiations and it seems clear that, if the nursing unions are to recommend any new deal to their members in preference to strike action, it is likely to cost closer to £30 million.

Ironically, the format of the deal on offer to the teachers should make it easier to conclude a deal with the nurses and other public servants. And it should ease current industrial relations tensions manifest in recent stoppages by 4,000 hospital workers and 10,000 civil servants.

The nurses have consistently been told that they cannot be offered pay rises which run beyond the lifetime of the PCW. It is clear now that this argument cannot be sustained by management negotiators, and deals offering increases to middle and lower grades of civil servants are also built on this premise.

In recent weeks, nursing union leaders have been arguing that the structuring clause was designed with the civil servants specifically in mind.

The teachers have superior pay and working conditions, which many will see as a tribute to the power of their unions. The nursing unions see their current negotiations as a "defining moment" in the history of their pay negotiations, and aspire to holding the same negotiating strength as teachers.

Some may ask how the Department of Education can afford to offer such an expensive deal to the State's teachers. It may be more appropriate to ask whether it could afford not to make such an offer.

The Department is still hoping to reform the pay determination system for teachers but, more importantly, it will want to sit down with the teachers unions as soon as these negotiations are finished to discuss even more far reaching changes set out in its recent education White Paper.

The conclusion must be that the teacher unions have driven a good deal and that the Department of Education could hardly afford not to strike such a bargain.