I AM A public servant, a teacher, and I will be on strike tomorrow. Like many of my colleagues, I’m doing so reluctantly.

This is why I found Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s suggestion in recent days that public servants seem to want industrial action, no matter what happens, to be extraordinarily unfortunate and inflammatory.

The last nationwide public service strike on anything like this scale was in November 2009, when Ireland was in the depths of the worst financial crisis in its modern history. That’s almost 17 years ago. Hardly the record of a workforce itching to get out on the picket line at every opportunity, Taoiseach, is it? 

I was equally incensed when I heard Mary Hanafin on with Brendan O’Connor on RTÉ as a former government minister lecturing teachers about whether we have considered the implications of strike action for the “ordinary people” of this country.

As though we ourselves are not ordinary people. As though teachers and SNAs are some entirely separate class of citizen, immune to the cost of living, the pressures of raising families, paying mortgages, managing childcare and trying to make ends meet. As though we don’t have children in schools ourselves, or families who will be affected by this industrial action.

And coming from a former teacher, no less. Someone who should understand precisely how seriously people in education take their responsibilities, and how reluctant they are to disrupt the lives of the children and families they work with every single day. The suggestion that public servants are somehow separate from the public is as insulting as it is revealing. We are the ordinary people of this country. We live in the same communities, pay the same bills and face the same pressures as everyone else.

Industrial action is supposed to be disruptive. It is a messy business, but that is rather the point.........

© TheJournal