The Minister for Tourism, Sport and Recreation appealed to the nurses to call off their strike scheduled for next week.

"It is because I know from personal knowledge and experience the kind of people they are, and the well-merited esteem in which they are held, that I, too, ask them this evening to hold back from the misguided strike action now threatened," said Dr McDaid, who is a medical doctor.

He asked nurses to note very carefully that the Government was not asking them to forgo or abandon any claim they had to improve their situation. Instead, it was inviting them to pursue their case in the context of forthcoming discussions between the Government and the social partners on a new national programme to succeed Partnership 2000. The Minister was speaking during the resumed debate on the Fine Gael private members' motion seeking talks between the two sides and calling for a cooling-off period to find a solution to the impasse before strike action.

Mr Charles Flanagan (FG, Laois-Offaly) described the Government's attitude to the nurses as "uncaring and insensitive". He added that history would "record the supreme irony of public affairs in the State in the autumn of 1999, as news breaks daily of scandal after scandal, of Charvet shirts, of Ansbacher and cattle debts, in the middle of an unprecedented economic boom, our nursing profession is forced to take to the streets and go on strike for a grievance which is well recognised as being well founded."

For the Government to accuse the nurses of endangering lives had added fuel to an already well-lit fire. "The Government does not appreciate the sense of grievance on the part of the nurses."

The Labour leader, Mr Ruairi Quinn, claimed that in some Government circles there seemed to be a determination to make an example of nurses, in a not dissimilar fashion to the manner in which Thatcher's government took on the miners in the early 1980s. "To be fair, this is not a category I would put the Taoiseach in, but I don't think it is an unfair description of Minister McCreevy's contribution to the process so far."

Mr Michael Ring (FG, Mayo) said that nurses were not trained to go on strike but to nurse. "That is what they want to do. The Taoiseach should practise what he preaches to the people in the North and sit down with the nurses and prevent the strike."

A Government amendment to the motion, calling on the nursing unions to call off the threatened strike, and pursue their case in the context of forthcoming discussions between the Government and the social partners, was carried by 73 votes to 66.