ALMOST three weeks of talks, have yielded little progress in the dispute over nurses' pay. Negotiators now have 48 hours' to resolve their differences.
Should they fail, the executive of the Irish Nurses Organisation, the main nursing union, will meet on Monday to review the situation.
Without an adequate pay offer, the outcome of their deliberations is obvious approval for a series of rolling strikes beginning with the main Dublin hospitals on April 16th and 17th.
SIPTU, Impact and the Psychiatric Nurses' Association of Ireland, which make up the Nursing Alliance, are likely to adopt a similar position.
The dispute involves more than pay but without a breakthrough on this item, the others become irrelevant.
The INO has repeatedly indicated that the top of the staff nurse rate must raised to £20,500 - £1,300 more than the offer rejected last month by over 99 per cent of nurses balloted.
This offer added £150 a year to the top of the staff nurse scale but doubled the cost of the original pay offer from £10 million to £20 million. This is because more than half of all staff nurses have reached the ceiling of the nine year pay scale.
The cost to the Exchequer of conceding the £20,500 figure has been put at £37 million. And this allows for the lengthening of the incremental scale from nine years to 15, something on which management is keen but of which unions are wary.
It is no wonder that the pay gap between the two sides has been referred to in negotiations as "The Grand Canyon".
The figures are not only a measure of the distance that has been covered but of the gap still to be bridged.
Some progress has been made on non pay issues. For instance, it is understood that management would be willing to see a significant number of the 4,000 temporary nursing staff made permanent.
There have also been signals that an early retirement scheme could be put in place.
The Cabinet, which heard a progress report on nurses' pay yesterday, has agreed in principle that nurses should be offered terms similar to those offered to teachers. But the pay structures for the two professions are not comparable, which may cause difficulty for management negotiators when they come to frame their pay offer.
One thing they can be sure of is that the unions will require an offer significantly better than the last one.
Not only did nurses vote by over 99 per cent to reject the previous offer, there was also sharp criticism of union leaders for even bothering to ballot on the terms.
There is widespread public support for the nurses' case. Their unions are therefore more likely to proceed with the strike ballot they deferred so that the last three weeks of talks could take place, than to bring back a deal that falls below the headline they have set themselves.