The decision by the Irish Nurses Organisation (INO) to vote for industrial action, was not unexpected, but the level of support for strike action at the State's hospitals is still astonishing. Over 10,000 nurses voted for industrial action while fewer than 400 voted against. These figures reflect the sense of anger and betrayal within the nursing profession.
Nurses are not natural militants. For decades they have been the most quiescent of public sector workers. The INO is a relative latecomer to Congress, while its patrons were traditionally matrons, themselves members of hospital management. As a result, the contribution of nurses was undervalued, even as their knowledge and skills base expanded in recent years to meet the many new demands placed, upon them. While money was found for other public sector workers, like teachers and health service administrators, pay levels and conditions in the nursing profession were allowed to slip behind.
In voting for strike action, the nurses are doing much more than simply rejecting a pay offer from the Minister for Health, Mr Noonan. They are giving vent to the strong sense of frustration that they were taken for granted. The nurses are seeking nothing less than a total reappraisal of their role within the health service. They want to establish the right to be taken seriously and some recognition from society in general that their role is, in its own way, as valuable as that of other health professionals.
The sense of grievance has been exacerbated by the failure of both parties in the dispute to appreciate that the nurses see themselves as a special case, deserving of special treatment. The INO itself, which was ready to endorse Mr Noonan's final offer of £45 million, is vulnerable to the charge that it underestimated the anger among its own members. For its part, the Government approach has been dominated by the need to preserve the spirit and the letter of the Programme for Competitiveness and Work (PCW). But as the Industry and Employment Correspondent of this newspaper has pointed out, national wage agreements are poor vehicles for conducting the kind of social revolution that is now under way in the nursing profession.
All of this means that the dispute may prove very difficult to resolve. The package on offer from Mr Noonan is not ungenerous: indeed it is the best offer made to any group under the PCW. But the issues in this dispute go beyond this or that percentage offer.
Mr Noonan says that he is very pessimistic that the strike due to take effect early next month can now be avoided. But the task facing the Government is to adopt a much more imaginative and flexible approach.
In current circumstances, the proposal by the general secretary of SIPTU, Mr Billy Atlee, for a commission on the nursing profession has much to recommend it. The establishment of such a commission - to examine contentious issues like early retirement and relative pay levels might help to provide a way out of the current impasse.