Professional pride can’t put food on table

Grey clouds hung threateningly over Omagh town on Tuesday morning, but the rains they seemed to harbour never burst from the heavens like we thought they might have.

It was an important day for the town – and, in fact, for the whole of the North. Teachers left their classrooms, and long-taken-for-granted faces vanished from the halls of our hospitals. This was the day when many of the people responsible for running our most important institutions finally decided that enough was enough.

At the top of Market Street, striking teachers gathered at the foot of Omagh’s Courthouse steps. They were joined by nurses, ambulance and hospital staff, who left their picket lines, along with other public sector employees, all making a collective cry for the government to increase strikers’ wages, and improve working conditions.

As the day opened, those inclined to drawing connections between the weather and the events of the world may have been worried for the welfare of the strike, as foreboding cloud formations filled the sky.

However, their superstitions would soon prove unfounded.

Because, what began as little more than a string of strikers stretched across the front steps of the courthouse steps, and, as the morning edged towards 10am, the crowd began to thicken.

By the time the first speaker took the microphone and their voice spilled out over the town, hundreds were in attendance.

The prevailing atmosphere was one of solidarity and indignation. It was clear that, though proud of their job and sure of their colleagues, the strikers had decided they could not live on the professional pride alone.

It is money, after all, that fills fridges and oil tanks.

Each speaker who took the microphone focused our – and their employer’s – attention on the worth of the work they do, and the unjust reward they receive for doing it.

These are the people who teach our children and keep the cogs of our hospitals turning.

People whose jobs are, insofar as a capitalist economy permits, vocations, and their essential message was simple, clear, and inarguable: We deserve more, we need more.

As impassioned speeches followed ardent address, it began to appear that something perverse must be at play to have ever allowed things to come to this.

It seems that any society that deems itself to be a fair and functional one must be able to lay claim to several fundamental things.

Ranking high among these, alongside a proper police service and a democratically elected government, should be an inclusive education system, and a robust health service.

Therefore, when the people who keep these institutions running stand up and scream, ‘we deserve better than this’, alarm bells should sound for us all.

For those of us who were oblivious to their plight, Tuesday’s demonstrations should have startled us from our ignorant slumber.

Meanwhile, those responsible for implementing and perpetuating the strikers’ inadequate pay and conditions, they should have awoken on Wednesday morning with guilt in their guts, covered in a cold, shameful sweat.

Both the health and education sector need investment, and those who work within them need to be treated with the worth they deserve.

Whether we will see this or not, however, remains to be seen.