There is no doubting the militancy of nurses in pursuit of their demands for higher pay and shorter working hours. But militancy, in itself, should not dictate the outcome of a dispute. That way leads to industrial anarchy. Agreed procedures are in place to deal with pay and conditions under social partnership and benchmarking arrangements and these mechanisms will have to be used to provide a fair and principled settlement for all concerned.
Patients have been distressed and health services negatively affected by the work to rule initiated by the Irish Nurses' Organisation (INO) and the Psychiatric Nurses' Association (PNA). That situation will worsen next week as nurses intensify their action through a series of rolling work stoppages. There is likely to be increased pressure on accident and emergency units and the further cancellation of elective surgery. These development are in nobody's interests.
It is no coincidence that the dispute has come to a head in advance of a general election. The Government is currently under pressure from a range of public and private interests to make financial concessions or to alter policy directions. And it is particularly vulnerable on healthcare, where it promised voters significant improvements. In such circumstances, nursing unions are using the muscle of more than 40,000 members to secure a pay claim that has already been rejected by the Labour Court.
Minister for Health Mary Harney has put the cost of meeting demands on pay and working hours at €1.5 billion. That is a huge figure at a time when the need for productivity and public service reform is being mooted. And while traditional pay relativities were supposed to have been abolished within the public service, the nurses' pay claim appears to be based on special awards made to some social care grades.
Nurses enjoy a very high status in our society. They are members of a caring profession that has developed and become more highly qualified in recent years. Traditionally, they were poorly paid and were taken for granted by governments and healthcare managers. No longer. They and their skills are gradually being accorded the recognition and the rewards they deserve. Because of that, frustration over a pay anomaly involving some social care workers should not be allowed to distract from the bigger picture and cause damage to their positive public profile.
It is a time for cool calculation and measured responses. The single, indisputable certainty in this situation is that negotiations will eventually be required to produce a settlement formula. Cynics suggest that nurses must be allowed to let off steam through industrial action before they can be encouraged to consider a necessary compromise. Such a view is both patronising and unbecoming.
It is in everybody's interest to reach a settlement. The social partnership process should be reactivated as soon as possible in order to prevent further damage to healthcare services.