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Students’ Council,
Oatlands College,
Mount Merrion,
Co. Dublin.
21 March 2001
Leinster House,
Kildare Street,
Dublin 2.
Dear Minister Michael Woods TD,
We, the students of Oatlands College, have come to Leinster House this morning to express our concern regarding your governments handling of the teachers' industrial dispute.
The ASTI have had their pay claim in for the best part of 18 months, yet in all this time you have been unable to resolve it. As a result of your incompetence and your mishandling of the pay claim, you have forced the ASTI to take the course of action that it has.
The disruption to the academic year, which this dispute has resulted in has brought much unnecessary stress and tension to Leaving and Junior Certificate students. We are particularly concerned about the postponement of the oral examinations and the uncertainty surrounding the Leaving Certificate written examinations.
Instead of concentrating on trying to get the exams to proceed normally you have being formulating contingency plans. Your reported contingency plans for the exams are inadequate and badly thought out, should they go ahead we fear they will result in widespread inconsistency in the marking of the exam scripts. This will inevitably result in the equity and fairness usually associated with the Leaving Certificate being absent from this year’s exam.
We urge you, for the sake of the Leaving Certificate students, to take the necessary steps to resolve this dispute as quickly as possible. The answer in resolving this dispute does not lie in confrontation but rather negotiation.
Signed on behalf of Oatlands College Students’ Council,
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