The INTO is expecting a substantial pay increase for teachers from the new bench-marking body, the general secretary, Senator Joe O'Toole, said yesterday.
"We are claiming a decent rate properly awarded. And we are no longer going to accept that young teachers have to face a 24-year incremental scale before they get the rate for the job," he told delegates at the 132nd INTO annual congress in Waterford.
As far as the INTO is concerned, he said, the move from traditional review to benchmarking review is "no more than going to a different ATM. We will punch in the formula and collect the pay-out".
Speaking in support of a motion linking compliance with the PPF with inflation rates, Ms Sheila Nunan of the central executive committee said benchmarking would provide the union with an endorsement for a go-slow campaign which could only be accelerated by the clinking of coins.
Mr Noel Ward of Tallaght, proposing the motion, said teachers were adopting a revised curriculum with the two additional subjects of drama and science. They had already taken on information technology (IT) as well as other new programmes.
He suggested first applying the brakes to the introduction of science. Teachers' spirits were low, and never before had there been such pressures from legislative and official obligations, lobby groups and commercial interests, Mr Ward said.
The congress overwhelmingly endorsed the motion noting INTO members' approval, by a narrow margin, of the PPF, and the programme's endorsement by the ICTU.
The motion instructs the union's central executive committee to "review inflation on a monthly basis, up to and including the Programme's commencement in October 2000, in the light of commitments to securing low inflation including the PPF's objective to curb house-price growth and thereby diminish its adverse implications for inflation more generally."
The motion further instructs the CEC to initiate a formal review of the programme through the ICTU if, in the CEC's view, inflation is seriously eroding the value of pay, and to send a report on this matter and on related recommendations and proposals to branches and districts by the end of 2000.
The final section of the motion asks the CEC to enlist professional advice and to consult with branches and districts in preparing its presentation to the pay bench-marking body.
Senator O'Toole said one of the areas of greatest concern to young teachers was that even the cheapest of houses were out of their reach financially.
"The people who own the vast tracts of land for housing in Dublin and other places are the same people who have a ready supply of stuffed brown paper bags and they are making sure that the supply of houses is drip-fed in order that prices are maintained," he said.
Government or local authorities should put a compulsory purchase order on this land, he said, and make it available to housing co-operatives and builders on the condition that any houses built must be put on the market at under £100,000.
Other problems facing the teaching profession included the shortage of psychologists. "In the North teachers are seconded to college, on full pay, to become qualified psychologists. We need a similar initiative in the Republic," he said.
The crisis in teacher supply meant it was impossible to get a trained substitute anywhere in the country, Senator O'Toole said.
Meanwhile, qualified teachers from the US, Australia and Canada were being paid and treated as unqualified.
He welcomed the publication of the Teaching Council Bill but wondered if it was too much to ask that one teaching council be enough for the whole island. "More than anything else North and South teachers are experiencing a burgeoning workload which is increasing at an out-of-control rate. We are determined that the pace of change be managed, controlled and slowed down."
This would require more than the curriculum help-line, announced by the Minister for Education, at the conference yesterday.
If the pace of change was not addressed, it was more likely to be the Samaritans' number union members would be ringing, Mr O'Toole said.