Comment Emmet OliverAfter more than three years as The Irish Times Education Correspondent, a number of issues stand out like a sore thumb - not least the public relations lessons the teaching profession has still not learned

Someone once said good teaching is one quarter hard work and preparation and the rest is theatre. It is strange, then, that during the last three to four years, Irish teachers have fallen down so badly in the area of presentation and communication.

Teachers, particularly teachers in this State, should excel at oral and written communication. They should be natural communicators, relaxed and masterful in the media, quick on their feet in public and able to articulate a vision for those who entrust their children to them every day. But the key word in that sentence is "should". Can anyone truly say that in the last three years teachers, in the public sphere at least, have managed to change the hearts and minds of the public?

Working for three-and-a-half years as education correspondent of this newspaper brought me into contact with hundreds, possibly thousands, of teachers. Many of them also wondered in their quieter moments why teachers were so ham-fisted when it came to public relations and why the teacher unions, in particular, could not seem to sell the profession's bona fides to an often sceptical public.

My experience of teachers, both primary and secondary, leads me to believe that teachers here have become so defensive they are no longer able to articulate a rounded vision of what teaching means in modern Ireland.

The paranoia and bitterness of some teachers, albeit a minority, shocked me during the years I engaged with the profession.

There were many examples of this. The ASTI teachers in Killarney, Co Kerry, three years ago who said a 30 per cent pay rise was necessary because their pupils were now driving bigger cars than them.

The teachers who talked about IT workers getting six-figure salaries and then gloated when the same IT workers lost their jobs and had to emigrate. The teachers who refuse to talk to or salute those who have been doing supervision in schools for the last few months, effectively keeping schools open.

All of this struck me and many of colleagues as odd. To be fair, most of these things were said or done during an acrimonious industrial dispute. But, like a lot of things, what is often most important is not what is said, but what is not said.

During the last three years, with maybe the exception of the INTO, have any of the teacher unions made a single meaningful or influential contribution to any major education issue apart from pay?

Does the public actually know how teachers feel about fee-paying schools, early school leaving, lifelong learning, the Irish language, student rights, Transition Year, truancy, the cost of education, the length of the school day, uniform policy, the decline of science, the underperformance of boys, sex education, exam reform, the points system.

I constantly rang up teachers, asking them for comments or contributions on a range of education issues and the only response would be silence down the phoneline. Ask about pay and a far more animated response could be guaranteed. It was amazing.

The worst example happened one day last year when a senior union representative sent over a passionate statement on fee-paying schools. I asked him why he had not issued it before and he said it had been on his desk for years, but nobody had contacted him and asked for his views on whether fee-paying schools should get State assistance.

Nobody expects teachers to be saints, to be inoffensive supplicants in front of the Department of Education, but it would be nice to think that teachers, of all groups, would be generating endless ideas about how to make our schools better.

Maybe they are generating such ideas, but during my tour of duty there were few signs of fresh thinking, again with some notable exceptions.

Probably like a lot of the public, by the time I reached my third year of education reporting, I had a pretty good idea what teachers were against - British-style inspections, a longer school year, school league tables, an end to the common basic scale, grind schools, evening parent meetings, performance-related pay and continuous assessment. However, counting up the changes teachers passionately wanted to see introduced to schools was far more difficult. Better pay, lower pupil-teacher ratios, repairs to dilapidated schools. That was about it, at least in terms of the big structural issues.

Having completed this far from academic exercise, I have begun to wonder in recent months whether teachers, who like to think of themselves as left-leaning radicals, have become the new conservatives.

They are against an awful lot of change and in favour of very little. Or, as one fellow journalist put it to me after witnessing a particularly long, drawn-out debate about the evils of school league tables, said: "God, they're almost as bad as the Unionists, its no, no and no again".

The problem with saying no all the time, whether it is to Whole School Evaluation or performance-related pay, is it becomes boring and sterile and the public lose interest.

That is the central reason, in my view, why teachers have found themselves floundering in public debates in recent years. I have no scientific proof for this, just my own personal observations.

Saying no, but articulating an alternative vision is something entirely different and there are signs particularly from people like John Carr (INTO) and John McGabhann (TUI) this may be happening.

But, still, is it any wonder the public, via radio chatshows and pub conversation, utter the most inflammatory and often mis-informed remarks about teachers, when they are constantly fed negative images and messages about teachers by teachers themselves?

This was certainly the most frustrating part of the my job for the last three-and-a-half years, watching teachers, who often perform heroics in their classrooms, descending into endless whining and self pity, particularly at teacher conferences.

What made it so frustrating was there are so many decent, honourable people in the profession, from all sides in the pay dispute. ASTI vice-president Pat Cahill, a former teacher of mine, and ASTI general secretary Charlie Lennon, who would rarely see eye to eye in the union on policy issues, are both fundamentally decent men.

John White, also of the ASTI, is one of the most lucid and deep thinking men in the teaching profession. There are many, many others who never achieve national prominence, but who infuse their schools with enthusiasm and energy every day. In the TUI, presidents like Joe Carolan represented their members brilliantly over the last few years, while retaining their sense of humour and perspective.

But these figures were all too often sidelined by the whiners and negativity addicts at the annual April conferences. Unfortunately, there is little sign of this changing.

This year will probably mean another round of condemnation of dangerous ideas like performance-related pay and school inspections. In other words, another annual chorus of "No", followed by a few boos and jeers for the Minister of the day.

The British education secretary, Charles Clarke, has decided to skip the British teacher conferences precisely for this reason. He says he is unlikely to hear anything new. I know how he feels.

Emmet Oliver has taken up a post writing a weekly column on the media and is also working as a business journalist.