Anthony Clare was exasperated. He told a panel of teachers he had never before encountered people so unwilling to listen to a different point of view.
Clare spoke some years ago on an ill-fated show called After Dark, which ran on Channel 4 late at night, one of those experiments where cameras kept filming until the discussion reached a natural conclusion.
There was none. Clare's words happened at a moment of crisis within the British education system that was never resolved. Teachers were leaving the profession, parents were calling for greater accountability, and New Labour was about to try to reverse years of Tory government conflict with local education providers; fruitlessly, as things worked out.
The desire to be right led many educators there to lose the war in order to win a point. It was a short-sighted strategy. British teachers now are subjected to intrusive levels of control and accountability. Students can't but lose out as a result.
Whatever decision Michael Woods makes about teachers' back pay, the education system is dangerously wounded after 21/2 months of the current ASTI dispute. No recent industrial dispute has exposed such a lack of cohesion among professional partners. Few others confirmed such a lack of power among its core constituents, students and their parents.
Students and parents are the most powerless group in Irish education, and therefore the most vulnerable. If anything strangely positive emerges from the current secondary teachers' dispute, it must be the knowledge of how lowly their concerns are in practice and how easily they can be put to one side.
IT IS telling that the sole issue on which both sides agree is the need to maintain parents in their historically infantile role as so-called partners in education. Perhaps parents are believed to be too emotional, too bound up with the needs of children.
Certainly, the system calculates them as immature. The assumption made by both the Minister and the unions is that the future of education must remain wholly in their own "safe" pair of hands. But this dispute reveals that the old pair of hands can't work together in a co-ordinated way.
A former education minister, Micheal Martin, reworked plans to strengthen the power of parents on school management boards in what became his 1998 Education Act. He was encouraged to do so by the teaching unions and managers, who now need parents' support.
But parents will realise, however emotional they tend to be, that this dispute is no longer about a better education service, it is about a set of power relations that will continue to exclude them. Unless that system changes, it is difficult to see how parents can wholeheartedly support even the most legitimate demands in the current dispute.
The negative image fostered overall by this dispute must inflict a greater level of collateral damage to the status of teachers than any social change, or alterations in the pecking order of public service pay. It is baffling to imagine why talented newcomers would want to enter a profession so patently distressed about every aspect of its working environment and future prospects.
At the height of the nurses' strike, critically-ill patients were still assured of first-class treatment. At the height of the secondary teachers' dispute, critically-affected students are not. That is one of the fundamental reasons the image of nurses was not damaged fatally by their industrial action, and why the image of teachers and teaching will be.
Winning the point seems to dominate the agenda of many different interests. Within ASTI, differences between the current leadership, as represented by Charlie Lennon, and the previous establishment, as represented by Bernadine O'Sullivan, run as deep as that between Eamon de Valera and Mary MacSwiney. MacSwiney's nostalgia for the ideal republic was catching, but never attainable. Her supporters wasted years in its pursuit.
THE spotlight may highlight the actions of teachers themselves; the focus must include Michael Woods. The Minister has on his desk a report from a former departmental secretary-general, Dr Don Thornhill, about the urgent need to change how the Department manages its business. He must by now be aware that he cannot continue to preside over a system which remains as centralised as when it was put in place before the State was established.
But the foot-dragging that characterised his behaviour during the Jamie Synott case is paralysing his political will to change the primary and post-primary sectors. Parents and students are now being asked to believe that if more money is delivered to teachers, a better education service will be delivered. Yet if you were to score the Irish education system according to international indicators, the comment would have to read: could do better. Measured against literacy rates, fluency with scientific concepts and other languages, Ireland does not make the upper percentiles. Something needs to change.
mruane@irish-times.ie