A secondary schoolteacher who sent inappropriate messages to three second-year students should be removed from the register of teachers, a disciplinary panel has decided.
The Teaching Council panel made the decision on Tuesday, having decided in November that the teacher, who it has ruled should not be identified, was guilty of professional misconduct and breaching the code of conduct for teachers.
The sanction “serves to properly acknowledge and reflect the gravity of the conduct and the egregious breach of trust and abuse of power underpinning the decision it has made in this inquiry”, said panel chairman Noel Cronin.
He said that, notwithstanding mitigating factors, the panel was “satisfied that anything other than this sanction would amount to a failure to uphold professional standards and public confidence in the profession and the regulatory process”.
The decision of the three-person panel must now be approved by the High Court. It decided that the teacher may apply to be readmitted to the register three years after his name is removed.
A teacher must be on the register to teach in ministerially approved schools.
The panel considered about 2,000 pages of messages sent over the school Teams system, occasionally at night, to the three teenagers. Some of the messages contained inappropriate content and content of a sexual nature.
One student was sent a message saying: “I thought you were 100 per cent gay,” and described the student as “such a bender”. A message to another student included wording considered a reference to masturbation.
The teacher told the panel that he suffered from loneliness and anxiety as a teenager and, while ashamed of the messages now, had not sent them with any “sinister” intent.
The hearing was told the teacher came from a small community, had wanted to be a teacher from a very early age, and had a strong involvement local GAA coaching from an early age.
He was temporarily employed by the school at the time of the behaviour, which occurred over a number of months in 2022 and 2023, and was at the outset of his teaching career. The students who received the messages were on a school team the teacher was coaching.
Prior to the panel reaching its decision, solicitor James Roche, for the director of the Teaching Council, Lynn Ramsey, said in a submission that it was the director’s view that the actions of the teacher were “at the higher end of the scale in terms of gravity”.
During his evidence, Mr Roche said, the teacher had referred to the messages as “locker room talk” but had not tried to argue that they were acceptable.
Solicitor Eoin McGlinchey, for the teacher, said the students who received the messages were already known to the teacher from his coaching activities outside the school.
There was “no evidence of any harm to any of the students,” he said. It was not a case where a teacher was trying to entice a student to meet up or engage in sinister behaviour.
“There was no attempt to cause any harm,” he said.
Mr McGlinchey said his client had not worked since the inappropriate messaging came to light and his career was now “in serious danger”.
His professional reputation had been badly affected and in his local community he was no longer involved in teaching or the GAA.
His client had acted “stupidly, naively, inappropriately and wrongly, but ultimately innocently”, he said.
A counsellor who has been seeing the teacher has said in a report that he was “at the lowest possible risk” of repeating the inappropriate behaviour, the solicitor said.
It was only when he began attending a counsellor that the teacher had opened up to issues of anxiety and loneliness he had had during his teenage years, Mr McGlinchey said.
The teacher had been “trying to relive his teenage years with those lads [the three students]”, he said
His client was attending the counsellor to try to overcome his “immaturity” and “neediness around people” and has made significant efforts to understand why he did what he did, Mr McGlinchey said.
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