As she chats in the bar with friends from her college days INTO delegate Deirdre Rooney lifts her blouse and her hungry 8-week-old, Fionn, latches on.
This year at the INTO Congress there are several women with very small babies in tow and the sight of a breastfeeding mother is pretty common.
Fionn guzzles away as Deirdre chats about one of this morning's motions.
It concerns parental leave. Currently, teachers seeking parental leave must take it in blocks no shorter than one week.
The union wants the Department of Education to allow teachers to take it in shorter stints, to take one day a week for instance.
This morning’s motion was passed unopposed and the union leadership says this will strengthen their hand.
"It would be hugely beneficial for us", Deirdre, who has two more small children, explains.
It shouldn’t be unusual to see mothers breastfeeding at a primary teachers conference but it is.
Around 85% of primary school teachers are female and very many of them are young.
The vast bulk of delegates in Killarney are women.
Yet the sight of mothers feeding babies at the congress is not one I remember from previous years.
There’s a new confidence about and a willingness to talk about issues related to gender that were previously swept under the carpet.
Another motion this morning concerned menopause.
On the spur of the moment, Michelle McCrystal from Derry decided to speak on the topic.
It was her first time ever speaking from the podium at such a conference, but she wanted to help break the silence.
"I am one of the 43% who have spent the last ten years struggling with symptoms of the menopause", she said, referring to a survey carried out by the union.
"I work in a staff room with mainly all female staff yet we still talk about it in hushed tones".
Michelle told of how she lost her confidence, ended up dropping two promotional posts as a result of anxiety and stress and moved to a four-day week.
"Temperature and ventilation, adequacy and adjacency of toilet facilities, a comfortable staffroom, and something as simple as the availability of cold drinking water", another speaker Siobhán Buckley told delegates were the simple measures schools needed to think about.
This motion too was passed without opposition.
Back in the bar, Deirdre Rooney’s friends Catherine and Liam Maguire tell me how they jobshare the same teaching post between them.
The prohibitive cost of childcare caused them to make the decision.
They work each alternate week, which leaves them free to care fully for their son Cillian themselves.
Teaching is a job that suits parenting and given that women tend to take on most of the burden of parenting it is no surprise that women are so attracted to the profession.
But they still face barriers due to their sex.
Around 85% of primary teachers may be women but just two third of primary school principals are.
So even though men comprise fewer than 15% of teachers in the sector they account for a disproportionate one-third of all of principals in the sector.
There is a lot more work to be done.
