National Teachers Strike 1946
The seven-month long strike by the Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) in 1946 strained the relationship between the Archbishop and de Valera who was Taoiseach at the time. The national (primary school) teachers wanted a wage increase and parity with their secondary school colleagues. As former teachers (and de Valera had also been Minister for Education in 1939/40), both men had a very high opinion of the teaching profession but the Government was facing severe financial constraints. De Valera acknowledged the national teachers great responsibilities, but was not only unwilling to grant them parity with secondary teachers, but refused to meet their more modest pay demands.
In his book "De Valera, The Man and the Myths" historian and journalist T. Ryle Dwyer writes: "When the teachers went on strike, de Valera viewed their demands as a challenge to the authority of his government, and he resisted their demands with the same kind of determination which he had resisted hunger-strikers. He even went to the point of straining his long friendship with the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, who tried to intercede on behalf of the teachers. Eventually the Archbishop persuaded the INTO to capitulate, but many teachers remained bitter and they would become enthusiastic supporters of Clann na Poblachta."
Read more about this topic: John Charles McQuaid
Famous quotes containing the words national, teachers and/or strike:
“You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“What’s this, Aurora Leigh,
You write so of the poets and not laugh?
Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,
Exaggerators of the sun and moon,
And soothsayers in a tea-cup? I write so
Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,—
The only speakers of essential truth,
Opposed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths;...
The only teachers who instruct mankind,
From just a shadow on a charnel-wall.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“if thou slip thy troth and do not come at all.
As minutes in the clock do strike so call for death I shall:
To please both thy false heart, and rid myself from woe,
That rather had to die in troth than live forsaken so.”
—Unknown. The Lady Prayeth the Return of Her Lover Abiding on the Seas (l. 19–22)