Increases sought by the Nursing Alliance could cost the Exchequer nearly £100 million, health service managers have warned.
Talks between management and unions at the Labour Court yesterday ended after 2 1/2 hours when the chairman, Mr Finbarr Flood, adjourned the hearing to consider management arguments that elements in the Nursing Alliance claim are inadmissible. Mr Flood is understood to have criticised the largest nursing union, the Irish Nurses' Organisation, for seeking a strike mandate from its members on Tuesday, less than 24 hours before the court was to hear their claim. Most of the other unions in the alliance have yet to ballot members, although they are expected to recommend industrial action if the Labour Court intervention fails.
Yesterday the court was considering only the first, and what had been assumed to be the least contentious, of the three pay-related recommendations of the Nursing Commission. This is the question of extra payments for professional qualifications held by nurses. At present these are worth £347 a year, and the unions are seeking increases of up to £2,200.
However, at yesterday's sitting the Nursing Alliance presented a claim for increases in all eight allowances, not just those applying to professional qualifications. The former include on-call allowances, unsocial hours premiums and allowances for working in particularly difficult areas such as intensive care units.
The chief executive of the Health Service Employers Association, Mr Gerard Barry, said after the hearing was adjourned that management considered most of the claim to be outside the terms of the Commission on Nursing's recommendations.
"The demands made were quite simply astronomical," he said. "They carry a multi-million price tag and would not be containable within nursing if they were conceded." He declined to put a specific figure on the cost of the claim.
However, the nursing officer of SIPTU, Mr Oliver McDonagh, said the claim fell within the terms of both the Labour Court recommendation (which averted a national nurses' strike in February 1997) and the recommendations of the Commission on Nursing.
"The Nursing Commission did not restrict its recommendations to the qualifications allowance," he said. "It is our contention that there is nothing in the . . . claim that should not be in it."
The section of the Commission on Nursing report dealing with allowances is ambiguous. While it emphasises the particular value of adequately rewarding nurses for extra professional qualifications, it also refers to other allowances. In recommending the referral of allowances to the Labour Court, it does not specify that any particular allowance should be either included or excluded.
The fact that talks on what had been seen as the simplest and least contentious issue in the report has already caused problems bodes ill for the future, when the bigger issues of grade restructuring and long-service increments are discussed.
Meanwhile, the Nursing Alliance and the Health Service Employers' Association are to meet at the Labour Relations Commission on Monday to resume negotiations on overtime and staffing issues. The INO has threatened industrial action from November 9th if agreement is not reached. However, union and management sources were optimistic yesterday that an agreed formula could be found.