A teacher has said having sex in a hotel with an 18-year-old former student was a one-off.<\/p>\n
Under cross-examination at a fitness-to-teach inquiry, she agreed this behaviour was inappropriate for a teacher, but she viewed the male as a past pupil when the encounter occurred in early August 2018. <\/p>\n
It is alleged the teacher had a romantic relationship with the male during summer 2018. <\/p>\n
Between June 14th and 20th that year, while he was sitting his Leaving Certificate, there were daily communications between the pair via picture messaging service Snapchat, it is alleged.<\/p>\n
The Teaching Council director alleges the woman had a sexual encounter with the 18-year-old male on an unknown date in early August that year. The teacher has admitted to this single encounter. <\/p>\n
When the inquiry resumed on Wednesday, following an adjournment since July, the teacher said a sexual encounter with the student came about in early August 2018 when she bumped into him while out in a bar with friends. <\/p>\n
\u201cMr [student\u2019s surname] came over to me and he said: \u2018Hi, how are you?\u2019 It was a brief interaction.\u201d <\/p>\n
She said they bumped into each other later that night. \u201cThe conversation was very natural in the bar. We left together.\u201d <\/p>\n
There was flirting between them and they went to a hotel where they had sex and stayed the night, she said. \u201cThe next morning I thought, \u2018Oh God, I need to get out of here\u2019. So I left first.\u201d <\/p>\n
She said she and the student had no contact before or since that night. <\/p>\n
She denied several allegations made by her ex-partner before the inquiry, including that a Facebook message from the student popped up on her phone. <\/p>\n
In July the panel heard the teacher\u2019s ex-partner provided screenshots to the inquiry of what he claimed was a diary kept by her. On Wednesday she said she never kept a diary.<\/p>\n
She said that being a teacher \u201cmeans everything\u201d to her. \u201cIt\u2019s part of my identity, I don\u2019t know what I\u2019d do if I didn\u2019t have teaching,\u201d she said, becoming emotional. <\/p>\n
The teacher has been working as a permanent member of staff in another secondary school since 2019. <\/p>\n
In closing submissions, Eoghan Cole SC, for the teacher, drew the panel\u2019s attention to the fact that the teacher called the student to give evidence. <\/p>\n
Eoghan O\u2019Sullivan, for the Teaching Council director, said the student, when giving evidence in July, was not in a position to deny evidence of alleged text messages on September 1st, 2018, between him and the teacher\u2019s ex-partner. In these, the latter allegedly sought to confront the student about his relationship with the teacher. <\/p>\n
One alleged message from the student said: \u201cThere\u2019s hardly anything going on with her, just talking to her about absolute b****x, because I got on great with her, nothing more than that.\u201d <\/p>\n
Mr O\u2019Sullivan put it to the teacher that this message could not be reconciled with her claim there was no communication with the student before or after the night they spent together in a hotel room. <\/p>\n
The inquiry\u2019s chairperson, Fergal McCarthy, said the panel would reconvene next Monday to hear advice from a legal assessor. <\/p>\n
After this, the panel is expected to retire to consider its findings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A teacher has said having sex in a hotel with an 18-year-old former student was a one-off. Under…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[23140,42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-28032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-fitness-to-teach-inquiry","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}