In this current era where demagogues threaten to deform nothing less than the secular and egalitarian ideals of democracy (Mishra, 2017), there needs to be renewed vigour on the promise of equal rights and citizenship in modern society. Ireland, partitioned into North and South in 1922, is renowned for struggles over democratic politics. Witness the collapse of the power-sharing arrangements following the controversies in Northern Ireland resulting in the forced elections in March, 2017, which test ideas of post-conflict education (Hughes et al., 2010). Likewise the controversies in the Republic of Ireland over the harsh terms of the bailout after the Global Financial Crash by the Troika, a Greek word to describe the European Commission (EC), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB), whose stringent austerity measures, part of the control and regulation of teachers’ work (see Sugrue, 2013), were a central feature of the forced elections in February, 2015.

These instances highlight teachers’ struggles in Ireland’s national system of schooling, both historically and in the current conjuncture, to exert professional influence on teaching and teacher education. From its inception in 1868 in post-famine Ireland, the Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) objectives have contained a commitment to promote education and the professional interests of its members (see McVeigh, 2011; Colgan, 2001; Mc Neill 1971; McCune Reid, 1956). For example, at its inaugural meeting when it was founded by Vere Foster who was born in Copenhagen in 1819 into a British diplomat’s family, the INTO gave witness to the ‘honourable tradition of concern and regard for education’ which the Irish people had by adopting as its first object ‘the promotion of education in Ireland, the social and intellectual elevation of the teachers, and the cultivation of a fraternal spirit and professional intercourse with kindred organisations in other countries (O’Connell, 1968).

The co-authors took a look back in history (Carr & Beckett, 2016, 2018), not just to the earlier clerical, nationalist, and social democratic settlements (O’Sullivan,2005; Lee,1989; Ó Buachalla, 1988) but to elements of the complex history of schooling in Ireland, pre-dating partition and stretching back into the C19th (Lee, 1989; Ó Buachalla, 1988; Coolahan, 1981). In the Republic of Ireland these pre-dated current neoliberal trends (see Mooney Simmie, 2012), which challenge different approaches to professionalism as required in response to historical and political circumstances. For example, in the 1990s the INTO decided to revamp its own consultative processes designed to achieve consensus on a wide variety of professional matters, to coincide with an initiative called Social Partnership that encouraged stakeholders as education partners in schools inclusive of parents, management consultants and other experts.

Likewise in 2001 coinciding with the establishment of the Teaching Council, a representative body, came government departmental initiatives that resulted in the intensification of teachers’ work including internal and external evaluation in regards Whole School Evaluation inspections, incidental or unannounced teacher inspections, School Self Evaluation, school reports, and pupil assessment. These are indicative of teachers’ loss of professional control to the bureaucracy, and at issue is what the INTO does in reply, which provokes critical discussion about democratic processes in education and institutions like the teachers’ trade union. This begs an urgent research question in the present, a time when a response to the painful and bewildering experience of globalisation, captured by the catch-phrase ‘take back control’ in Brexit negotiations, points to unaccountable technocracies, opaque financial markets and hopes to reconstruct a political space by forging afresh the sovereign “people” (Mishra, 2017). The imperative is to ask how will the INTO adapt to the need for a new settlement to ensure the teachers’ voice?

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