Bishop amazed that teachers are continuing action

The Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork, the Right Rev Paul Colton, has said there is "incredulity" that teachers seem certain to continue their industrial action over the way money is to be paid to them.

To many strikes in the main were about pay increases, and deservedly so in the teachers' case, he said, but not the mechanism by which those increases were paid.

Chairman of the church's Secondary Education Committee, Bishop Colton told the General Synod in Dublin yesterday it was of "great concern to us that industrial action should have been maintained for so long and should have caused such upset to pupils.

"Moreover, we believe it is inappropriate that pupils should ever be unwitting hostages in industrial disputes," he said.

As a patron and member of school boards, he was "profoundly aware that it will take years to rebuild those partnerships, not totally squandered, but certainly damaged, that were already being established through great effort and at immense cost". That said, it was essential that hope be restored to disillusioned teachers. He felt, however, that school management and boards of management had been forgotten in the dispute.

They had come under huge pressure from all directions and stress, too.

"Any system which relies on volunteers and which takes them for granted has to recognise the risk it runs of alienating people of goodwill," he said.

"If volunteers walk away the whole management basis envisaged in the Education Act, 1998, will crumble," he said.

The Rev Scott Peoples of Glendalough diocese addressed the General Synod on the unique and essential contribution to the ethos of the Church of Ireland made by its College of Education in Dublin, and warned against taking it for granted.

"Temptations to cut costs and to rationalise resources are always attractive to Government Departments. Education is no exception. But the independence of the College of Education delivers far more that just a return on capital investment.

"It helps to contribute a distinctive voice in the education and nurture of young people which benefits not just our own religious community but the nation as a whole," he said.

High standards, committed effort and dedication to the ethos of the church were the achievements of all the college's professional and dedicated staff, he said.

The support of a denominational schools structure by successive governments since the establishment of the State recognised that it was "only through the provision of a separate college dedicated to the training of teachers for Protestant schools that the fairest and even-handed treatment of our ethos and the ethos of parents and children can be supported," he said.