Fórsa has declined an invitation to talks at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) intended to resolve the week-old strike by school secretaries and caretakers.
The union said it could not suspend the action without a guarantee the discussions would be about how and when its members would become eligible for public service pensions.
Minister for Education Helen McEntee said the Government was prepared to enter talks on the dispute “without preconditions”.
“It is unfortunate that we were not able to make progress through the WRC last week,” she said, “but I have been engaging intensively with my colleague Minister [Jack] Chambers and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform since then, to try to get us to a point where we can make progress.
“We met again today, and Government is here and ready to engage with Fórsa without any preconditions.”
Fórsa, however, declined, saying the Government would not confirm that talks would be about when and how secretaries and caretakers can be integrated into the public service pension scheme.
“Entering a formal WRC process would, in all likelihood, require the strike action to be suspended prior to the talks commencing,” said the union’s head of education, Andy Pike.
“Returning to the WRC, without that assurance, would risk a repeat of efforts to resolve this issue in 2022, when pension talks were shut down by the Department of Public Expenditure. There remains an absence of trust sufficient to suspend the indefinite strike action currently in place.”
Mr Pike said the union was prepared to enter preliminary discussions with a view to establishing if there was the basis for a settlement, but it would not suspend the action before doing so.
[ ‘Our absence impacts the children’: School secretaries and caretakers continue strike over work conditionsOpens in new window ]
Disruption to school services continued around the country on Thursday with the refusal by special needs assistants (SNAs) to pass picket lines at some locations, again forcing the cancellation of classes as well as the complete closure of at least one school, St Joseph’s in Fairview.
Principals at a number of others, meanwhile, told The Irish Times that growing backlogs around routine issues such as accounts, bin collections and maintenance will make greater disruption, and potentially more closures, inevitable if there is no resolution to the dispute.
Leona O’Connell, principal at the Presentation Primary School in Fermoy, Co Cork, said the situation at schools such as hers will become “increasingly challenging” because of the central role the staff play in the “simple logistics of the day-to-day running of things”.
“The secretaries and caretakers are sort of the unseen heroes of the schools in many ways,” she said.
“Aside from all of the routine work, we have families from 36 different countries in our school and there is a huge cohort of parents who need help filling out documentation related to all of the services they need … [school secretary] Bridget does that, she is the point of contact for the parents generally, and the children would be used to dealing with her, but she is a community link and support as well.
[ ‘Worth more than a box of chocolates’: School secretaries and caretakers demand pension parityOpens in new window ]
“If a parent needs to take a child out during the school day, to visit the dentist for instance, she is the one who looks after that. We have a blitz coming up in the town and we are lucky that the children will be able to walk to that, but in normal circumstances there would be a bus and it is the secretary who organises that. There is all the administrative work and dealing with contractors. It is a very long list.”
She said that the school’s secretary and its part-time caretaker are involved in issues connected to maintenance of buildings at the school, which has 250 children, five classes for those with autism, 24 teaching staff and 19 SNAs.
Issues on both the administrative and maintenance sides were already being felt, but the latter may ultimately prompt closures, she said.
