NURSES and health service managers have trodden a long and tortuous path towards confrontation, with the Government throwing up various diversion signs along the way in an effort to avert the catastrophe of a national strike.

The reason for the Government's delaying tactics was the fear that a major award to nurses could pose a threat to public service pay policy. Ironically, the delays have only fuelled growing militancy among nurses and increased the final bill that will have to be met.

Management and union sources agree that if the £37.5 million package offered last April had come a year earlier it would have been snapped up by a relatively quiescent workforce. But in April 1995, six months after talks on a radical restructuring deal began under the Programme for Competitiveness and Work, there was still no offer on the table.

It was only when the nurses threatened to pull out of talks that a package of demands was made by management, but with no detailed costings.

The first serious rumblings of discontent among ordinary nurses came at the union conferences later in the year. At the largest of these, the Irish Nurses' Organisation conference in September, the Minister for Health, Mr Noonan, admitted progress had been slow.

It still took until December 1995 for management to put its first package on the table. It was worth £10 million and was rejected by the unions. By February 1996 the package had increased to £20 million. Nurses voted overwhelmingly to reject it.

THE next offer came in April after three weeks of intensive negotiations brokered by the Labour Relations Commission. The official price tag was £35 million, but privately management and unions conceded the real figure was at least £37.5 million. It was rejected by four to one. The union with the highest margin against was the rapidly radicalising INO.

At the INO annual conference in May the mood was distinctly militant. A new, young executive was elected, many of its members staff nurses with a mandate to push the pay claim to the limit. Several branches were only dissuaded with great difficulty from proposing a vote of no confidence in the union's general officers for recommending acceptance of the terms.

By now the Government and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions had realised they were facing a dispute of major proportions. The Taoiseach, Mr Bruton, met ICTU leaders on May 15th and later announced the establishment of an emergency adjudication tribunal.

The tribunal produced a new package worth over £50 million. This was also recommended by the nursing unions, but failed to produce an overall majority.

While members of SIPTU and the Psychiatric Nurses' Association of Ireland voted to accept, it was rejected by the INO, which has two-thirds of the nurses in the public sector, and more narrowly by IMPACT. The INO and IMPACT then conducted strike ballots, resulting in over 90 per cent voting for industrial action.

As soon as the INO had a result on January 10th, it served strike notice for next Monday. The reason for the long notice was to allow SIPTU and the PNA to ballot their members on supportive action for the INO and IMPACT. Both also voted overwhelmingly for industrial action.

Since then there have been intensive discussions between nursing unions and health managers on the level of cover to be provided in the event of the strike going ahead.

Last Tuesday the chairwoman of the Labour Court, Ms Evelyn Owens, called in both sides for exploratory talks.

The next move will be up to the four unions concerned. All of them are meeting today to decide whether to accept the recommendation.