Whether or not it’s stepped up to the plate by now and done the decent thing for school secretaries and caretakers, the fact that this strike even had to take place says a lot of things about the Irish government.

None of them laudatory.

But you could use just one word for all of those things.

Optics.

Our politicians are obsessed by optics.

These lads had no problem approving a mind-boggling €9 million of taxpayers’ dosh for mobile phone storage ‘solutions” in second-level schools.

They were only too delighted to approve a free school textbook scheme, paid for by the taxpayer and estimated to cost €170 million for the 2025 school year, to cover the cost of something most parents always paid anyway.

I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of this scheme or of the free hot dinners scheme either – these programmes are a Godsend for many hard-pressed families - but the dogs in the street know that there’s also a very significant number of well-heeled couples out there who are more than able to shell out for textbooks and dinners.

Yet, when it comes to giving school secretaries and caretakers a pension to take them into old age, optics doesn’t seem to be an issue for the government at all.

Maybe because this group, which is not highly paid, constitutes a relatively small number in the Department of Education’s gargantuan personnel files.

Sure, what’s 2,600 secretaries and caretakers across Ireland’s sprawling network of primary and second-level schools?

Funny thing, though, what officialdom seems to forget, is that these people are the lynch-pins of every school.

And........

© Evening Echo