The Irish Nurses Organisation (INO) entered the Labour Court hearings yesterday in a significantly militant mode. It had just received a unanimous mandate from a delegate conference of its membership to invoke industrial action if its claims are not given due consideration by the Court. Understandably, this stance has been subjected to criticism but, as the secretary-general of the INO, Mr Liam Doran, has stated, it might have been less than honest to come to the hearings without registering the degree of anger and frustration among its grass-roots members. Mr Doran, commendably effected a moderating influence on unrealistic claims that had been proposed at the delegate meeting and duly defeated.
The Chairman of the Court, Mr Finbarr Flood, adjourned the hearings on the first of three pay-related issues (this one on allowances) and has not yet announced a date for reconvening the Court. This is the first practical demonstration that the hearings are likely to be difficult and prolonged. The employers' representatives have asserted that the allowances claims being made by the alliance do not fall within the terms set out by the recent nursing commission chaired independently by Miss Justice Mella Carroll. The INO asserts differently.
The arguments appear unlikely to diminish as the hearings go on. It may be worth reminding ourselves of the history upon which the nurses' case is based. There appeared to be a general consensus when a national nurses' strike was narrowly averted in February last year, that the nurses had established that their professional duties and skills had so altered in the previous quarter century that their professional structures and status (including that recognition of status and responsibility that is manifest in remuneration) had to be altered. The Carroll Commission report confirmed this by recommending significant changes in career paths for the members of the profession, in payments which gave recognition to acquired skills and increased levels of qualifications and skills in various sectors of the profession.
The internal changes in the work and the responsibilities undertaken by nurses, it was generally agreed, merited a change in the historic relativities between the pay of nurses and others working in the public service. The nurses' claims were, therefore, to be treated outside of the customary mechanisms of public service pay, ring-fenced from previous pay relativities in the public service. Not even the taxpayers, who must ultimately meet the needs imposed by the changes, appeared to demur strongly or collectively from this general consensus. And, despite the attempts by some public-service unions to leap-frog the nurses' interim financial settlement last year, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions appeared to accept that the nurses' case was a special one.
It would do no harm at all if the Congress were to make a formal statement now that they accept this premise. The Government has already done some harm to history by trying initially, after the publication of the Carroll Commission's report, to divert the monetary elements of that report into the public-service pay structures. Thankfully, it reversed that initial proposal by the Minister for Health, and the Labour Court is now adjudicating on the case, as had been recommended by the commission. The Court has a very good track record on such adjudications and the nurses deserve its most careful consideration.