Nurses put paid to days of silent servility

LAST Friday on RTE Radio One's Morning Ireland, Michael Noonan pressed the "God bless our nurses" button and jump started the old, familiar, worn out tune. Irish nurses are . . . the best in the world ... are known all over the world ... are the best qualified ... the most compassionate. And other such sentiments. This spiel is done in low, reverential tones. Any minute you expect a Gregorian chant to moan softly in the background.

But last Friday was different Aine Lawlor's voice brought the record to a sharp stop. She reminded the Minister for Health of the here and now. These nurses, she said briskly, were a very angry lot of workers. What was he going to do about them? Then you got the more in sorrow than in anger bit. Did he not put £10 million on the table? And then? Well, Aine, didn't he huff and puff at the Cabinet table? Then didn't he tack on another £10 million? And sure, there's no money left. At all. At all. He sighed.

Minister Noonan will do a lot more than sighing before this rout of himself and his department is over. For the first time, I can hear the swell of despair among nurses turned into a steely anger. For the first time, I sense a calm and united resolution of purpose. For the first time, there is a mature assessment among nurses of their notoriously under valued work. There is an awakening that has been long in coming but once here, there is no going back.

In fact, for most nurses, it hardly matters who is Minister for Health at the moment. It is the anonymous civil servants in Health and Finance who have been outed as the real decision makers. Once again, they are showing their incredible ignorance and foolhardy arrogance in their niggardly dealing with the issue of nurses' pay and conditions. Once more, with little feeling, they are taking the usual put up or shut up line.

They know that, regardless of what they do, their own substantial salaries will continue to plop through the letter boxes at the end of every month. They know that when their lives of solid backsides on comfortable chairs are over, satisfyingly index linked pensions will continue to cushion them from reality.

But Minister Noonan should worry. He is the one who will be facing the nurses, their families and patients - who are doomed to further unnecessary suffering - at the next election. In 12 months or less, he will be facing a helluva lot of No's if he continues to listen to the chorus of "yes, Minister" people who run his life. They have already done enough damage by ridiculously trying to trap the lives and work of nurses in a league of bureaucratic, piffle.

One of the many signs that this dispute is totally different to any in the past showed up this week in the Letters to the Editor. It was from Maeve Dwyer and Peta Taaffe. It did not say they are the matrons of the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street and St James's Hospital, respectively. Hospital matrons do not lightly write to newspapers in the middle of a dispute. Neither do they usually say in public what Ms Dwyer and Ms Taaffe said in their letter.

It said, in part: "If these negotiations are allowed to drag on until nurses have to consider strike action, we in Ireland stand to lose far more than we could possibly gain by delaying or limiting a pay increase. We have a compassionate, caring and well motivated work force which, if driven to such industrial action, we are likely to lose forever.

"There is an urgent need to correct pay anomalies which have arisen over several years. The strength of feeling among nurses was recently demonstrated when over 2,000 attended a meeting in Dublin. If Irish society places any value on the service provided by nurses, this is the time to demonstrate it."

The days of silent servility are long over. The days when nurses muttered among themselves but kept up the bright face of professionalism for the public are gone. For too long, many of them believed the clap trap about being angels of mercy, saints or professionals who did not grovel over sordid things like money.

When I did midwifery at the Rotunda Hospital 20 odd years ago, there was nothing more awful than when you had to accompany a woman and her husband to their car, and had to accept a box of chocolates when you handed over Grainne or Oisin. It was embarrassing for nurses and patients. She knew you were paid buttons but, in some way, she was trying to show her appreciation for the bit of attention she had got.

It was often middle of the night sort of attention - the shoulder to blubber on, the encouragement to continue breast feeding or the assurance to tell her to relax, buy bags of formula and the bonding would be just as good - which made the difference in the way patients evaluated their experience in hospitals.

It was still more embarrassing for patients who did not have anything to give a nurse for whom they had developed a special fondness; for whom they felt their time in hospital had been immeasurably improved by one nurse or the staff of one ward. They did not feel they owed anything special to doctors, physiotherapists, radiographers, lab technicians or porters. They certainly did not feel they owed much to the god almighty who came and went amid great pomp and ceremony, who muttered things to his retinue and left the nurse to translate the outcome of his deliberations.

What the officials at the Departments of Health and Finance do not realise is that today's nurses are no longer prepared to put up either with real roses or rosy platitudes. Cliche's are kaput. Most qualified nurses and a significant number of student nurses are working mothers. They pay childminders. Cars are a necessity. Mortgages are essential. Because there was no work in Ireland for many of them when they qualified, by now they have been abroad and seen the lifestyles of their colleagues in other countries. Conditions and pay at home sag painfully by comparison.

In the last 10 years I have seen the nursing profession lose many potentially terrific workers and shapers of the future because of the slapdash quality of nurses education. Particularly so after the deadly cutbacks in 1987, when young nurses were turned loose on wards, with little preparation. They were confronted with the lethal combination of numbingly tiring, challenging work and a hierarchical system that subdued them into silence. They saw their friends, with much the same number of points, going to university and becoming "oligists" of one kind or another. The friends' lives seemed free and full in comparison with theirs. There were not enough trained staff to show them that things would get better; or to tell them that the job satisfaction in nursing is among the highest in any profession. The best often left.

What officials in Government Departments have obviously not yet learned is that young women (and a growing number of men) who have chosen nursing as a career see it as a job for life. They want to be well educated for a job which will be rewarding financially, as well as in other ways, ash they grow older. They do not want bad backs for life because they are forced to lift patients on their own. They will not put up with a job that keeps them in a state of genteel penury most of their lives.

In the absence of a couldn't care less attitude from the Department of Health for many years, the debate about their future has been developed by nurses, their organisations and unions - which have finally seen the worth of strength of unity and numbers - and the farseeing members of the Irish Matrons Association. Over the years of apparent vacuum, an energised confidence has been gradually replacing the apathy of nurses.

The ballot papers have gone out - with recommendations that nurses turn down the ridiculous proposals from Minister Noonan. The result will be known, on or before, the 29th of this month.

It needs to be - and I believe will be - resounding. Who believes tall stories about the money not being there? Proinsias De Rossa could get £195 million last year to compensate women who were due social welfare arrears. The most important issue in the nurses dispute is a serious arrears in attitude to nurses in the Department of Health, from the top down.