The vice-president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Mr Joe O'Toole, has accused the Government of failing to show any serious commitment to making the pay elements of Partnership 2000 work.
Mr O'Toole, who is also general secretary of the Irish National Teachers' Organisation, said that the Government's indecisive approach was making a successor agreement increasingly remote.
Unless the Government was prepared to tackle the issues of public service relativities effectively and creatively, he predicted the current crisis over pay would worsen.
On the one hand, he said, "I don't see any appetite in Government for the discipline and restraint needed" to make the current agreement work and, on the other, he saw "no recognition of the greatly increased expectations amongst workers and the need for a new agreement that can meet those expectations".
He was speaking as the three nursing unions prepare to meet on Tuesday to discuss a "catchup" pay claim. The teachers settled for 5.5 per cent under the local bargaining clause of the Programme for Competitiveness and Work only to see the nursing unions reject increases worth 23 per cent last week.
It is expected to take the teaching unions two months to formulate and present their claim, by which time the nurses could well be on strike. It is thought unlikely that schools will be affected by industrial action before the new year.
Referring to the growing resentment among teachers at settling early, Mr O'Toole said: "we find ourselves in a situation where we played everything by the book and now we see a situation where everything is unravelling".
However, he was also at pains to distance himself from some teachers who have expressed anger that nurses should be seeking pay parity with them. "I will not attempt to determine what nurses should be paid, any more than I would allow teachers to be paid on the basis of what nurses, or anyone else is paid. Having said that, if there are relativities applicable to us, we will apply for them".
However, the general secretary of the Psychiatric Nurses' Association, Mr Des Kavanagh, who said last week that staff nurses would be seeking parity with teachers, said yesterday that there was widespread anger at the attitude of teachers. "And there is extra anger among nurses everywhere when they realise a nurse working a 39-hour week, often with very unsocial hours, is earning £100 a week less than a standard graduate teacher."
Teachers also had more generous and more widely applied allowances. "The vast majority of nurses have significant postgraduate qualifications, most of which is not recognised in pay terms.
"We are not saying that nurses are entitled to greater pay awards than teachers, but we are saying that what we are entitled to is not one whit less. We make no apology for that."
Mr Kavanagh said that nurses were prepared for a "free-for-all", if necessary, to win pay parity with comparable professions within the public service.