THE Minister for Health has said the current nurses' dispute, presents a "serious dilemma which will have to be resolved.
Speaking to journalists at the Association of Health Boards in Ireland conference, Mr Noonan said that a way would have to be found to reconcile the stability of the economy with the need to have well motivated professional staff working in the hospitals.
"We can anticipate two sets of pressures in the years immediately ahead," he said.
"One will be the inexorable pressure for additional and higher quality services, and the other will derive from the stronger discipline on public spending arising under the Maastricht criteria."
These had to be tackled by improving the management of health boards.
He referred to the Health (Amendment) Bill 1996, which has just been published, and said it would clarify the respective roles of members of health boards and their chief executive officers.
The board members would be responsible for policy functions, while the CEOs would look after operational matters.
He said all health boards should develop a strategy to tackle the problem of drug abuse. "I will simply refuse to believe from any board that this is not a significant issue in its area.
"The evidence from young people is very emphatically to the contrary and there is an urgent need to tackle this head on, at least to try to avoid a spread of our hard drugs problem beyond the large urban areas," he said.