ON BEHALF of the media I would like to say, that most difficult word, 'Sorry'. I am sorry. All of my colleagues in the Sunday Tribune are sorry. My colleagues across the Irish media are sorry too. We are all full of remorse.

Last Wednesday, RTE radio's News at One programme broadcast a few clips of teachers speaking at the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland (ASTI) conference in Galway.

Comments made by one male delegate speak for themselves. He opened by claiming that we live in "the most crooked country" where our crooked government has delivered the "Celtic Lame Duck" that is "pumping billions of our money into paying back their cronies' gambling debts".

He continued by lambasting the "crooked media", that for the last year and a half has made his life miserable.

"In many respects the propaganda we have got from our crooked media has hurt more than the pay cuts. We have a government that is using the economic crisis to impose an Ibec right-wing agenda on us and put us back into medieval conditions of work. Do the people in the media know the hurt, the offence, the demoralisation and the devastation they have caused to us and all public servants over the last year and a half? Shame on you!"

Shame on us. How dare the media point out that the public finances are in a dire state and that cuts to the public-service wage bill were an unpalatable but necessary measure to keep the IMF from the door?

As the media lies wounded this weekend following the ASTI delegate's attack, it is worthwhile to look at how the same media covered the teacher conferences during the teachers' two-week Easter break.

The overriding message coming from teachers' conferences, from the heckling of education minister Mary Coughlan by the INTO to the steely silenct treatment given to her at the TUI gig, is that our teachers are not happy. They have been put back into "medieval conditions of work" and they are not at all impressed.

Then again, an analysis of newspaper cuttings would suggest that our teachers have never been satisfied.

Take April 2002, at the height of the bubble. Yet newspaper clippings tell us that the teachers' unions were involved in an "impasse" with then minister for education Michael Woods. After earlier rejecting a proposed €34 an hour for supervision, reports from 25 April that year tell us that the TUI was about to reject a revised €36 an hour from Woods. As the ASTI had withdrawn altogether from supervision the previous month, non-teachers had been recruited to carry out supervision and substitution in schools.

Three years later, media reports tell us how delegates at the TUI congress complained of the growing problem of indiscipline in schools. It was causing more and more teachers to retire early on grounds of stress and depression. On 29 March 2005, TUI president Paddy Healy claimed there had been a major decline in the status of teaching because of low pay, increasing workloads and lack of investment in schools.

On the same day, Healy strongly rejected any suggestion that teachers' pay should be linked to performance-related issues. "Performance-related pay would totally undermine the collegiate ethos of teaching and lecturing," he said.

But the headlines emanating from a teachers' conference are never about underperforming teachers on no account getting sacked. Sacking rarely happens. Instead, the incompetent teachers create a mini-industry for some of the more capable ones who give grinds to the bad teachers' students. Imagine if the cash payments for these were not 'under the table'? Sure the "crooked government" would only get their hands on some of it.

Even in the boom the teachers were not at all happy.

Every Easter, the teachers gather for their annual 'moan-in' but they never seem to realise that nobody is forcing them to stay there. If any of them really feel that they cannot put up with the conditions and poor pay they are free to leave at any stage and look for a job in the private sector. They may even decide to come over to the dark side and work for the "crooked media".

It is wrong to pigeon-hole teachers and criticise them all with one brushstroke. Many of them do not even go to the conferences, as even the expenses carrot cannot entice them to attend.

It is also wrong to take the media as one distinct entity. The media does not self-analyse and criticise itself enough but it is a bit of a generalisation to label the entire media as "crooked". The public vs private sector debate is actually far more crooked.

Back to those teachers who are really upset about their medieval work conditions. They should down tools and come work with us in the media. They should first be warned that the journalists who are lucky enough to still have jobs, like most people in the private sector, have taken pay cuts at a time when they have to work harder. Other journalists are among the 430,000 people on the dole.

There are thousands of teachers in permanent pensionable jobs, largely immune from the recession. Any one of them that leaves to become a journalist may end up uttering that difficult phrase, 'Sorry'.

cmcmorrow@tribune.ie

Shane Coleman is on leave