Breaking News! - Pupil's Protest in Dublin today!

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday March 12, 2002 18:28 by Paul Kinsella - Globalise Resistance paulkinsella53 at yahoo dot com 53 Lorcan Grove, Santry, Dublin 9, Eire 087 - 9748511

Breaking News! - Pupil's Protest in Artane today!

This is something that the capitalist media have failed to mention so far because they're terrified of giving any oxygen to the growing Secondary Student's revolt against those yellow-pack, unqualified 'Supervisors' who are scabbing against ASTI's ban on supervision and extra-curricular duties.

Earlier on today over 150 Secondary School Students from schools in Coolock and Artane on the Northside of Dublin walked out of their classes and staged a march to the Artane Roundabout, which they blocked for a while causing traffic chaos and they also threw some eggs. The Students are protesting against the deployment of those yellow-pack, totally unqualified 'Supervisors' who have been brought in to scab against ASTI's ban on supervision and extra-curricular duties and the Students have warned of further and much longer and much larger protests in the days to come till the ASTI dispute is settled and normal supervision is resumed by the only people qualified to supervise the Students namely the Teachers. Many of the Students have suffered bullying because those yellow-pack 'Supervisors' are totally unqualified to deal with cases of bullying for example, amongst many other concerns that the Students have about these 'Supervisors'. Hopefully this will be the spark that ignites mass Secondary School Student's Protests like the ones that we had this time last year. It would be brilliant if the mass Secondary School Student's Protests of last year were re-ignited as they finally forced the Government to at least actually talk to ASTI and to be seen to be 'trying to do something' to sort out the Teachers' grievances (something that they hadn't even been doing for months beforehand!). Especially with an election coming up soon the Government doesn't want a repeat of the scenes of last year of thousdands of Secondary School Pupils Striking and Protesting. Question? Are the Union of Secondary Students (USS) still active? If not they should be reformed urgently!