When principal Michael Finn opened Gorey Community School up at 7am on Wednesday morning, "the smell came out to meet me," he said.
It wasn't terribly bad, but it was a warning. With the school’s three caretakers out on strike, no one was emptying the bins across this the largest school in the country.
"Once you get vermin in a school of this size then really it’s game over", Mr Finn reckoned, and that was his big concern - rats and mice.
Over the course of the past week, the story of Gorey Community School came to epitomise much of what this strike was all about.
Who was on strike?
Some school secretaries enjoy full public sector pension and other entitlements and others don’t.
Secretaries employed in State ETB schools have full entitlements and are not part of this strike action.
Some secretaries working in other schools - both primary and secondary - also have these entitlements, but most don’t.
It all depends on whether they were employed before or after the mid-90s, with those in the latter category the ones who have lost out.
Gorey Community School’s secretarial and caretaking staff epitomise what seems like an unfair and arbitrary distinction.
Of its four secretaries, all working together doing the exact same work in the same school, two are State employees with full public sector entitlements, and the other two are employed directly by the school on lesser terms.
Out of its three caretakers, one is out in the cold.
This strike was in pursuit of equal terms for all school secretarial and caretaking staff. They believe that they should all be treated the same as all other public sector workers, with access to pensions, sickness benefits and other entitlements.
Despite their contractual differences, all of Gorey Community School’s secretarial and caretaking staff were together on strike and on the picket line this week.
Pressure on the system
"In a school this size it just doesn’t stop," says Gorey Community School caretaker Brian Dowling. "I’m the one on the crappy conditions," he adds, anticipating my first question.
Mr Dowling has worked as a caretaker at the school for 19 years. The job he describes sounds like a vocation.
He explains how he used to work in finance; how he abandoned a career as an auditor thinking there had to be more to life.
"I really love this job," he said. He explains how a daily diary of jobs to be done mostly just goes out the window.
"At 9:10am, the phone rings, there’s a window broken at the front of the school, and we need to fix it.
"There is a bin that has split open and spilt its contents across the corridor. All the general mischief that kids between 12 to 18 get up to, we have to sort all that."
And then there are the school toilets and its leaky roof. Both are due to be replaced soon, but in the meantime toilet blockages and overflows occur "constantly".
When it rains, there are containers in the attic under leaks that need to be emptied, to prevent water leaking down into the school.
With its caretakers and secretaries on strike for the past week and a half, Gorey Community School tried to manage. It limited attendance to just half of its students at a time, with the other half remaining at home.
It cancelled its hot school meals and asked students to bring packed lunches instead, and to bring their rubbish home.
But even at that, the waste was piling up. It is the caretakers’ job to clear it, and with the caretakers on strike this was not happening. By Tuesday, Mr Finn was highly concerned, but conflicted too.
"When all this is over, we still all need to work with each other in a harmonious environment," he told me that evening.
The following day, Wednesday, Mr Finn described the school’s looming rubbish crisis on RTÉ News Online, and on the Nine O'Clock News.
He consulted with the Association of Community and Comprehensive Schools. The Department of Education phoned him and suggested that a contract cleaning company be brought in.
On Thursday, that is what happened. Workers from a local Wexford company frequently used by the school, Advance Cleaners, went in and cleared the rubbish.
"This was a very difficult decision," one person closely associated with the school told me.
"But the school was between a rock and a hard place.
"I know the people on the picket line do feel that it is a kick in the teeth, but senior management are in full support of them," they added.
'Stirred up a hornet's nest'
Tension within the school community had been mounting. The fact that a local contract cleaning company went in to remove the rubbish "stirred up a hornet’s nest", according to one person connected with the school.
The strikers felt that the whole school community was fully behind them.
Yet at the same time, the school had moved to circumvent the worst effects of the strike by hiring in others to do the work of their striking caretakers.
By Friday, the mood around this strike, both locally and on the political front nationally, seemed febrile.
On Friday morning, the calls for an end to the dispute, directed towards Government, were intensifying.
On Friday afternoon at Gorey Community School, a group of parents joined the striking caretakers and secretaries on the picket line. They were energetic and noisy, holding up placards and shouting and clapping.
By Friday evening, it seemed that resolution could be in sight.
In a video posted to social media, Fórsa’s Head of Education Andy Pike told secretary and caretaker members: "We think we finally, after all these years, have got some movement on delivering pension parity for all of you.
"We do have some movement and I hope we are at the early stages of a resolution," he said.
That resolution came late on Friday night, when Minister for Education, Helen McEntee, confirmed that there had been a breakthrough.
All strike action has been withdrawn, following discussions between Fórsa and the Department of Education at the Workplace Relations Commission.
