I welcome the Sinn Féin motion and call on as many workers as possible to come out this Friday, on May Day, at 6.30 p.m. in Dublin. We need a movement of workers in this country and workers need to learn from what happened during the recent protests. I do not have much time, so I will focus on the mistreatment of workers by the Government, their employer. They are the ASTI members. The Government has taken a decision to restrict access to promotional posts for the senior cycle leaving certificate reform. It will not be open to ASTI members, the biggest second level union in this country, because the ASTI did not vote the way the Government wanted it to vote in a recent ballot. The Government is discriminating on the basis of union membership. ASTI members are being punished, not because they rejected senior cycle reform, by the way, but because they rejected an unsafe and unsupported implementation model. Despite this, ASTI members are now excluded by their employer from applying for AP1 and AP2 posts while other teachers in the TUI, in no union at all and who did not have a vote or who did not bother to vote will be permitted to apply. Even if they did vote against it, it is a bit like saying that Fine Gael tried to abolish the Seanad and failed, so it should never be allowed to go into the Seanad. It is the exact same situation. This is a clear escalation from past disputes over pay and conditions into direct discrimination in career progression for teachers who are members of the union. Teachers are being asked to take on a huge amount of responsibility and these were the issues that determined that vote for State certification through additional assessment components. Teachers now have to verify authenticity in the age of AI, effectively taking over roles that were once done by the State Examinations Commission. They are also being asked to supervise exams or to run exams with significant safety concerns, for example the new laboratory-based assessments. These issues remain unresolved and it is not an isolated pattern. It follows a previous pattern where ASTI members were discriminated against but it is new in not allowing people to apply for promotion. It now means that any worker should learn from this because if the Government does not like a decision taken in a ballot, it can discriminate against you in order to reward compliance by one group of workers. That is an absolutely disgusting decision and I am asking the Minister of State, Deputy Dillon, to reverse it. The Minister of State knows that he cannot stand over it. I am hoping it will be legally challenged on the basis of discrimination on the basis of union membership. It is absolutely shameful by the Government.

Sentiment score: 0.04