Bad teachers to be sacked shock

national | education | other press Wednesday December 10, 2008 15:35 by Dev

There are good teachers, then there are the incompetent. Read more about them at Gombeennation.

It seems that Irish teachers are about to have a belated introduction to the hire-and-fire aspect of the world of work – but at least they’ll still have their holidays, counted in months, to recover from the trauma. This follows a revolutionary agreement forged between Department of Education, and school and teacher representatives.

And what kind of teachers, in Gombeen Man’s experience, were the most dysfunctional? You guessed it: Irish language teachers. Many of these teachers were, at best, mediocre in every other respect (or subject), and would not have come within a flying blackboard-duster’s range of a classroom but for Gaelic. Only for it, in its State-sponsored Frankenstein manifestation, they would never have been teachers.

Another specimen carried with him a threat of simmering menace, which found expression on occasion. A big ex Gah player with a big ignornant lump of a turnip head on him, he - like so many Irish language enthusiasts / careerists - did more to discredit his supposed cause than he would ever have the intelligence to imagine.