In April of this year, members of the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) voted to campaign for a referendum on the right to housing, rent control, affordable student accommodation, and for the State to mass-build social and affordable housing.
In the same month, the president of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO), Joe McKeown, said no recently qualified teacher could expect to own a home, and that the cost of rent was out of reach for many. The consequence of this, he said, would be an exodus of young teachers from the profession, all trained up and nowhere to go.
THE ASTI supported the Raise the Roof campaign to protest the housing crisis. It’s no wonder. The average house price in Dublin is now beyond the financial reach of between 85 and 90 per cent of the population. One in four homes in Dublin is now privately rented.
The staffing crisis teachers are experiencing now wasn’t caused by Covid
The drive to change the culture in Ireland from home ownership to renting is a nonsense when that rent is unaffordable, tenants don’t have the same protections as countries that have functioning rental systems, short leases are totally normalised and embed tenant insecurity, and poor standards in rental accommodation is something people just have to put up with, while paying ridiculous amounts.
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The salary scale of a secondary schoolteacher begins at €38,192. A young teacher will be paying 20 per cent tax on €36,800 of this, and 40 per cent tax on the remaining €1,392, leaving them with a take-home pay of €30,275.20, or €2,522.93 a month. If they were renting a bedsit studio apartment on the North Circular Road in Dublin, which now costs €1,600 a month, besides having the glamour of a washing machine at the end of the bed, they would then have €922.93 left of their monthly pay, or €230.73 a week.
That’s before transport costs, food, clothing, going to a GP or dentist, internet and phone bills, heating and electricity, a pint of beer, a ticket to a play, a birthday present for a friend, a plant to put on top of the bedroom washing machine, and every other conceivable cost that everyone contends with. This is simply not workable.
We are now dealing with a situation where many young teachers are in insecure housing; staying temporarily with friends, or in makeshift digs, or commuting long distances from the same kinds of childhood bedrooms their students go home to when the bell rings. Dublin in particular is going to be dealing with an acute staffing crisis in its schools because young teachers cannot afford to live in the city or county. Many will look for jobs in their home counties outside of Dublin, where they can either move back into their family homes and save, or attempt to avail of the vaguely cheaper rent outside of Dublin.
The staffing crisis teachers are experiencing now wasn’t caused by Covid, although it has been exacerbated by it. There has been much discussion around the flawed austerity-era two-tier pay conditions in teaching. But the idea that we needed more teachers, at a time when there were plenty of stories about an abundance of teachers trying to get contracts, was a long-term issue in a land of short-term thinking. In 2012, the Sahlberg Report was published, a report on teacher education provision in Ireland.
Over half of all secondary schools in Ireland that need teachers
In that report, the alarm bells were already ringing, “The Review Panel was surprised and concerned that the issue of teacher supply and demand has not been addressed in Ireland as it has been elsewhere.” The report suggested appropriate databases and forecasting mechanisms be developed to ensure an adequate supply of teachers with the required curriculum specialisms. It would take six more years for a teacher supply steering group to be established.
Principals are often scrambling for substitute teachers to fill gaps. Some 55 per cent of second-level principals in Ireland have reported unfilled vacancies in their schools. That’s over half of all secondary schools in Ireland that need teachers. Incredibly, 84 per cent of principals reported that when they advertised vacancies, not a single teacher applied. One of the reasons the Leaving Certificate results date was delayed is because enough teachers to correct the papers simply could not be recruited.
In Ireland right now, employment exists. Opportunities exist. But teachers are leaving schools and sometimes leaving the profession entirely because they can’t afford rent, or look at their pay cheque and realise it’ll never get them near a mortgage. The new wave of emigration we are experiencing from Ireland is not about seeking employment, and not necessarily about opportunities either.
It’s about not being able to afford a room to rent, and the cost of living and quality of life issues that go along with that. Ireland is an insanely expensive country without any of the indications in services, infrastructure, amenities, and quality housing that tend to go along with living in an expensive place. We are rich on paper but impoverished in reality.
If we don’t cut and freeze rents to affordable levels, and radically overhaul renting in Ireland (everyone with ideas tethered to reality knows the solutions), soon teaching, nursing, policing, and many more sectors will begin to mirror a version of the chaos at Dublin Airport, as hospitality already has. Plenty of people are highlighting this issue, so Government politicians can’t say they weren’t warned. Ignorance may be bliss, but ignoring an obvious burgeoning crisis is reckless.