It is teachers' conference week, and the teachers are angry again because they feel they are not paid enough. Many people get a little tired of teachers being angry about pay, in the same way they are tired of farmers complaining about EU supports. There is a public perception that teachers are relatively well-paid for doing safe, pensionable jobs, with short days and long holidays.

The situation is better than in many countries. The 1997 OECD study of teachers' working conditions found that Irish "lower secondary" teachers of 15 years' experience had the fourth-highest salaries among 18 developed countries, and the second-lowest number of teaching hours per student per year. However, they also suffered from one of the highest pupil-teacher ratios.

The economist Dr John Fitzgerald, using earlier OECD figures, has noted that Irish secondary teachers came fifth in terms of starting salaries; third - following the Germans and the Swiss - after 15 years; and sixth at the top of the scale. A similar picture was shown by the data for primary teachers.

In England, teachers start off slightly better than their Irish counterparts, reaching a salary of over £22,000 sterling in seven years. However, that is a ceiling, with no further increases for any teacher who does not get promotion.

In contrast, Irish teachers with an honours degree and a Higher Diploma in Education can expect to earn £20,500 after seven years (a pass degree will bring it down to £18,700), after starting on a first-year rate of just over £17,000 (£15,400 with a pass degree). After 25 years' service such an unpromoted teacher's salary rises to just over £30,000.

The perception among teachers is that people going into computers and other hi-tech sectors earn far more than them at a far younger age. At this week's Teachers Union of Ireland conference, a Dublin Institute of Technology lecturer, albeit one with a PhD, said her peers working in information technology were earning two to four times her salary.

The actual differentials at graduate entry level are not quite so dramatic: statistics published by the Dublin firm Computer Staff Recruitment show that honours graduates going into software and other IT jobs earn £17,500-£20,000 with bonuses.

Their earnings ladder, however, then becomes spectacularly steeper than a teacher's. After five years a teacher who has not been promoted can expect to earn £19,400. In contrast, a software engineer in his late 20s who started on £18,700 could be earning well over £30,000 with bonuses, while a database designer starting on £19,000 could be earning up to £45,000.

In stark contrast, the middle-aged principal of a Dublin second-level school with all the headaches of educating and caring for the wellbeing of 400 urban teenagers is probably earning less than £40,000.

But that is the harsh reality of the market system. The hi-tech firms are the ones leading Ireland's economic boom, and the skills shortages they are experiencing as a result are driving up the salaries they offer.

The market is what matters. Dr Fitzgerald notes Irish teachers' high salaries by international standards and says he is "broadly unsympathetic" to their demands for significant salary increases.

He says the Government made a choice in the difficult late 1980s that it would go for education cuts in return for maintaining good pay levels for working teachers. That policy has worked reasonably well: a high-status profession has delivered a good education to our young people.

In Britain they have gone in a different direction, with a much better pupil-teacher ratio but a relatively poorly paid, low-status and demoralised teaching profession.

Dr Fitzgerald says teachers have signed up for successive national partnerships which have seen the incomes of those in work rise significantly and the numbers at work increase dramatically. Most teachers are in the country's top 10 per cent in terms of income.

Then there is the vexed question of productivity. All three teacher conferences heard about the exhausting increase in teachers' workloads, with the introduction of a new primary school curriculum; the implementation of a wide range of new curricula at second level; and the explosion of Post Leaving Certificate places in the vocational sector. Next there is the coming of the computer age to the classroom, with the revolution in teaching techniques it implies.

"There is an unease among teachers at the speed of change. It has unsettled people," says the TUI general secretary, Mr Jim Dorney. "The unease takes the form of being obsessed about productivity. That becomes the focus for their discontent."

The most heated debates this week have been about new inspection methods - the so-called Whole School Evaluation - and the Government's desire to tie future public sector pay deals to productivity. In many teachers' minds they are linked: if yardsticks for evaluating and measuring teachers' performance in the classroom can be worked out, they believe, it must be only a matter of time before they will be used to start determining teachers' pay. And "performance-related pay" was the week's nightmare phrase.

There is real puzzlement about how teachers' productivity can be measured, other than by crude British-style methods based on exam results. Teachers at the TUI congress asked how one could measure the relative effort of bringing a child in a remedial class up to the standard needed to pass a foundation level exam with the work to bring a more academic child through a higher-level paper.

The INTO leader, Senator Joe O'Toole, is reported to be perusing a weighty volume from the US on how such measurements are worked out there.

Meanwhile, on the issue teachers do understand - pay differentials with comparative public sector groups like the nurses and gardai - progress was made. The delegates gave their leaders the go-ahead to take a united stand to "bridge the gap" those professions opened up by shrewdly settling late during the last national agreement with a significant local bargaining element, the Programme for Competitiveness and Work.