The INTO has voted unanimously to mount a campaign, including industrial action, against Government inaction on teacher and school funding shortages. The emergency motion noted "with dismay" the "inadequate response" of the Minister for Education, Mr Martin, when he addressed the INTO congress earlier this week, to the "serious, immediate and worsening problem of teacher shortages and inadequate funding in our primary schools".
On Tuesday, the general secretary, Senator Joe O'Toole accused the Minister of "wilfully ignoring" the urgency of the teacher supply crisis. However, Mr Martin said INTO proposals for 800 new teacher training places a year were "unrealistic".
Introducing the motion, Ms Sheila Nunan, of the INTO executive, said that while Mr Martin had dismissed the union's proposals on training places, he had not offered any figures of his own; neither had he offered to sit down with the INTO and work out a "multi-annual plan" to deal with current serious shortages, particularly in supply teachers.
She said at the very least a proposed increase in the "top up" graduate training programme should be brought forward from next January to September, and steps should be taken to make it easier for Northern teachers to have their qualifications recognised so they can teach in the Republic.
She also suggested that the training colleges could put on fewer BA and more B.Ed programmes.
There followed a long line of angry principals and teachers telling of serious teacher shortages in their areas and schools.
Mr Martin O'Donoghue, a principal from Tullamore, said a recent survey of 27 schools in his area had shown that there had been 16 days where no substitute cover was available at all, 26 days when absent teachers were covered by qualified teachers, and 700 days when they were covered by unqualified people.
In the Tullamore area, instead of a supply panel, they had three retired teachers who had to be "begged and cajoled into doing a couple of days service".
Ms Carmel Corcoran from south Dublin said a class in her area recently had four substitutes in 13 school days.
Mr Eoin Shaughnessy from Athenry, Co Galway, said he was particularly concerned about long-term teacher replacements.
He gave the example of one teacher who was out for a year and was replaced by 12 people in succession. Another went on leave last September and had been replaced by eight people so far.
Ms Marjorie Murphy, a principal from Darndale, north Dublin, recalled a teachers' meeting in the late 1980s, when class sizes were often 40 plus and the politicians and pundits were saying there were too many teachers.
Senator O'Toole had said then, to an incredulous audience, that there would be a shortage of teachers in the not-too-distant future. Unfortunately, he had been proved right.
She said her enthusiasm for the Minister's announcement of six days in-service training for teachers in the new curriculum next year was tempered by her dread of coping with the 174 substitute days that would involve.
Mr Declan Kelleher, a principal from Corofin, Co Clare, said parents and boards of management were "as fed up as we are of standing outside the school gates begging in order to prop up an essential State service.
"We should take the decision over the coming months that the time is right to decide that as and from a certain date, all bodies - parents, teachers and management - will withdraw from fundraising and allow our schools to go into debt and in some cases deeper into debt."
He said the time was also right "to expose a Government that came to power with a clear commitment to bridge the funding gap between primary and post-primary, and when presented with the first opportunity to do so ran away from their commitment and threw a mere £5 onto the capitation grant in the hope that the problem would go away."