*School secretaries on the picket line, Deirdre Madden, Barbara Kearns and Yvonne Enright.
VALUED MEMBERS of schools across Clare and the country feel “ignored” by the Government and Department of Education and will stay on strike as long as it takes, a Scariff school secretary has insisted.
School secretaries and caretakers have been on strike since Thursday after talks at the Workplace Relations Commission failed to get them included on the Single Public Service Pension Scheme.
Scariff woman Maureen Kelly has been the secretary at Scariff National School for the past nine years. She was frustrated with how they’ve been treated differently to their colleagues. “We’re just looking for parity, we’re more aware than anyone of how differently were treated within the school system, we are the first people you meet in a school, we’re working with all the different departments, the Department of Education, the payroll division of the Department of Education, the HSE for vaccinations and dental appointments, we work with TUSLA, we work with them all but we’re not treated the same as the rest of the staff”.
She continued, “We’ve 145 students, the school is also fed by two refugee centres, we’ve nineteen different nationalities and I don’t know how many different languages, we’ve extra supports for the non-English speaking, we’ve quite a big staff but even though the school numbers aren’t huge there is a lot of work involved”.
Work that Maureen is ordinarily responsible for will not be completed in her absence, she said. “The others won’t be doing it, that is the whole point, it will be there and unfortunately it will still be there no matter how long this goes on and we’ll have to face into that when we go back but everyone is quite happy to stay out because the Government aren’t reaching out to us, they are trying to ignore us, we’re a small group of people, we’re not the demographic you would expect to strike”.
Speaking to The Clare Echo, Maureen admitted she was not surprised that they have been ignored. “I’m sure they all feel there is more things going on but I also think there is a floodgate that could be opened, there is only 2700 of us out on strike, we’re usually only one per school, we’re a very small demographic and it will take a few days for the hits to be felt but it will because we’re one cog in a wheel but the wheel will stop turning at some stage”.
Standing on the picket line and away from their offices has not been easy for the secretaries, Maureen flagged. “It is not easy but I do think it is morally correct, we’re working for a public body doing public service work in a public service building, everything we do is for public service, we want to be treated the same as any other people doing public service work”.
Maureen said the strike will continue as long as secretaries and caretakers are ignored, “We’re prepared to stay out until the Government are willing to come and talk to us, nothing is going to happen overnight and we don’t expect that, it could take a long time but until they start talking we’re out and they didn’t try to meet us, we were having this strike since the 10th of June and the first meeting was the day before the schools were due to open which was the day before our strike, they ignored us for ten weeks during the summer, none of us want to do this but they had ample opportunity but they’ve just ignored us so we had to do this”.
She concluded, “Most of us have great support from our schools and from the other staff, a lot of the other staff wouldn’t have been aware that we weren’t on the same terms as them, I think the public in general are behind us. I hope the schools don’t close, I was personally disappointed that the SNAs closed a couple of schools, I didn’t like to hear that because education is very important, we love our jobs, we like what we do and we are good at what we do, we’d like to have parity with the rest of the school staff”.
