What is taking place in Government Buildings this weekend is not a negotiation, it is a process. There is a great danger that nurses, already having to cope with the pressures of an increasingly acrimonious dispute and appalling weather on the picket lines, will fail to make the distinction.
The reality is that even if the vice-chairman of the Labour Court, Mr Kevin Duffy, does what no one else has done and secures consensus between the Nursing Alliance and health service managers, the issues will have to be referred back to other agencies before a final agreement can be reached.
Most of the outstanding issues on pay and allowances will have to go back to the Labour Court. Those relating to career structures and promotional opportunities might go to the Nursing Commission and some issues in dispute could be referred to the social partners in "a post-2000 setting".
Put simply, what is going on at Government Buildings is a process for deciding "who gets what" to sort out. And yet time is the one commodity that is scarce in this dispute. Already there have been a number of brushfires over emergency cover in some hospitals.
Nurses providing emergency cover for nothing are becoming increasingly angry at the criticism aimed at them by some senior management and medical personnel. The fact that emergency cover is gradually deteriorating under the pressures imposed by the strike does not make the criticism easier to bear.
It will raise the question of whether nurses would be better off reducing the cover in a planned way to increase pressure on the Government rather than see it degenerate in an unplanned fashion or, still worse, be overtaken by local wildcat action.
Already the Irish Nurses Organisation's industrial relations director, Mr David Hughes, has warned that this could happen. Yesterday rank and file nurses were arguing on picket lines that, if there was not a quick resolution to the dispute, unions should set a deadline for reducing cover to force a settlement.
Mr Duffy will be trying to use the "process", not just as a clearing house to decide which agency is asked to deal with what issues, but to try and draw the alliance and management closer together.
In effect, side by side with identifying and parcelling items on the agenda such as allowances, promotional outlets, recognition of long service in the staff nurse grade and reporting-back procedures for directors of nursing, he will be seeing if the two sides can at least reach outline agreements on some specifics.
These are likely to include how the 2 per cent local bargaining clause can be used to boost staff nurses' salaries without a knockon effect in the rest of the public service, or exactly how many promotional outlets can be created for staff nurses - and when. Informed sources suggest the figure available could be as high as 1,000 and they could be in place within 12 to 18 months.
Mr Duffy is only likely to discuss these sort of issues in liaison with the Government, the Labour Court and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, to ensure they are "social partnership compliant". It would be too cynical to see the process as simply trying to create a ready-up, whereby the Nursing Alliance and Health Service Employers Agency sing from the same hymn sheet when they reach the court, the nursing commission or the monitoring committee for Partnership 2000. However it would be naive to think that no actual negotiations will take place.
Whether they can make enough progress fast enough remains to be seen but if Mr Duffy cannot "square the circle", as Mr Cowen puts it, then nobody can.
Padraig Yeates can be contacted at: pyeates@irish-times.ie