The absence from this week's teacher union conferences of the Minister for Education and Science, because of the death of his baby son, will inevitably lower their profile.
The two Ministers of State in the Department, Mr Noel Treacy and Mr Willie O'Dea, will read his speeches, but any announcements of initiatives due to be announced have been put on hold.
One of these was to have been the abolition of the compulsory oral Irish test for second-level teachers.
In the absence of a senior minister to applaud and attack - although in the case of a successful incumbent like Mr Martin the attacks would have been largely formulistic anyway - the main interest at all three conferences will be pay.
Teachers are deeply unhappy that in the Programme for Competitiveness and Work, the last national agreement with a significant local bargaining element, they settled early for a 3 per cent rise, which rose to just under 6 per cent during the life of the agreement.
But other public sector groups, such as gardai, nurses and prison officers, refused to reach early agreement and ended up with increases of 11-14 per cent.
The three teacher unions have now agreed to put the same motion on pay to their respective congresses, demanding increases in teachers' salaries which will reflect those gained by other public sector workers.
But it is also likely there will be angry demands from the floor (particularly at the TUI congress) that nothing should be given away on productivity in the next round of national agreement talks.
Elsewhere much of the sting has been taken out of union demands by a series of initiatives on staffing and funding announced by Mr Martin over the past six months.
The most significant were the 450 new primary and second-level teachers announced in December as part of a £57 million package to deal with educational disadvantage; and another 150 primary teaching posts announced last month as part of a plan to reduce class sizes to a maximum of 30 pupils.
These were particularly warmly welcomed by Senator Joe O'Toole, who had clashed angrily on radio with the Minister over the range and movability of the INTO's demands last October, but last month was applauding "the first real increase in primary teacher numbers for 14 years".
The ASTI is sounding far more militant these days, threatening industrial action over class sizes in second-level schools and publishing a survey saying 60 per cent of classrooms in that sector are overcrowded, with more than 30 pupils.
Overall, Mr Martin has had a good second year in office. Part of this is due to the huge amounts of money in the Government's coffers, and his ability to persuade powerful colleagues to allocate major funding to overhaul and update an education system which is still seriously underfunded by OECD standards.
He has been helped in his arguments by a belated international recognition among politicians and employers alike that "human capital" is the key to expanding the "knowledge economy" which will be the basis of present and future prosperity, and therefore spending on education must be a cornerstone of any government's economic policies.
But he has also shown courage. He took a risk in giving Leaving Certificate students access to their marked exam papers, calculating that the popularity of the measure would force a reluctant ASTI to fall in behind it eventually. Despite the prophets of doom, the innovative scheme worked very well in its first year, and is now being watched with interest by the British and other governments.
In standing up to Mr O'Toole he showed, for the first time in a national arena, the kind of steel he will need if he is going to take on difficult issues like new methods of school inspection and the need for new non-examination forms of assessment, particularly at Junior Cert level.
He can expect fierce opposition from the TUI and the ASTI memberships on these issues.
One body he has not shown any desire to reform is the biggest vested interest of them all, the Department of Education and Science.
The centralised structures of this behemoth remain as clogged and over-stretched as they were when the OECD first recommended years ago that many of its powers should be devolved.
Critics say that despite the frenetic pace set by the young Minister and his senior officials, and the resulting stream of ministerial announcements, there is little strategic thinking in the Department, and thus little discrimination between big, medium-sized and small initiatives.
The Department is still responsible for minute decisions of every type. Acute staff problems in the Department's Athlone offices, dealing with exams, personnel, pensions and other areas, which were close to exploding last year, have been temporarily papered over.
In its strategic management initiative document last September, the Department itself accepted that it does not have the proper human resources to do its massive job properly, and argues that the Department of Finance will have to relax its inflexible bar on new appointments.