Title: That was the Crisis: what is to be done to fix Irish education now?
Abstract: In 2008 Ireland found itself in the forefront of the Eurozone crisis.The impact on education has been profound.In this article it is suggested that Ireland's education problems long pre-date the economic crisis and current 'reforms' are about long-term neoliberal restructuring, not short-term solutions to immediate economic problems.Rather than treat teachers as the problem, there is a need to work with the profession and to reclaim the value of education for its own sake.Teacher unions are central to mobilising around this much more optimistic vision of education.The economic crisis in Ireland was not the cause of the introduction of education reforms, but the experience of the 2008 crash has provided the occasion and opportunity for dusting down previously shelved attempts at educational change and given new impetus to their implementation under the cloak of 'necessary austerity'.When the term 'austerity' is applied to any reform, of course it becomes easy to dismiss it, but it doesn't make it easier to challenge it.In 2008, when cuts were first being applied to public services, the issue for Irish teachers was to place education at the heart of a plan of recovery, and to make the case to ring-fence education from the cutbacks.Despite demonstrations, delegations, debates and even a day on the picket line, they failed.Ireland's experience of the 2008 financial crisis has had a major impact on the country's schools and those who study and work in them.The long-term damage resulting from the crisis has been substantial.To choose just two examples from many that hurt education and teachers deeply: first, guidance counsellors, who were an ex quota entitlement for schools, were diluted back to the general allocation of teaching jobs; and second, and to all Irish teachers' discredit, the pay of new entrants to the profession was uncoupled from the pay of their more established colleagues, creating a two-tier workforce in which new teachers were badly disadvantaged.The correct