If the nurses' strike goes ahead tomorrow we will all be entering uncharted waters. This will be the largest industrial dispute in the State's history and the severest challenge this Government has faced.

It is not simply a test of Cabinet resolve, or ability to say No, but of the Government's capacity to react to a rapidly changing industrial relations environment. So far the signs have not been encouraging.

The nurses have been accused of everything from "claim-jumping" other public service workers (by the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy) to threatening to destroy the social partnership (by the Minister for Health, Mr Cowen).

But the nurses in their anger and frustration over past neglect and difficult working conditions as well as pay are trying to play out an industrial relations game of their own.

Nurses bear the brunt of public anger at shortcomings in the health service; especially in areas where they are highly vulnerable such as accident and emergency units, outpatient departments, closed psychiatric wards and as public health nurses in the community. Now they plan to express their anger on the picket lines.

How long they stay out remains to be seen. The shock and anger with which the Irish Nurses' Organisation reacted to the news that members' pay would be stopped from the start of the strike suggest they have not fully thought out the realities of the dispute. Many nurses had hoped to be paid normally in October and face the deductions in November when the blow would, perhaps, be softened by a return-to-work settlement.

It could be argued that nurses are not going on strike at all, but will work to rule without pay. Far from hurting the employer, this tactic could starve union members back.

Inevitably there will be strains between different groups among the strikers. Staff nurses, public health nurses, psychiatric nurses, ward sisters and nurse managers all have different grievances. However, by far the greatest divisions could develop between those nurses who feel they have a binding moral duty to provide the highest possible level of emergency cover to the public and those who feel, equally strongly, that it is in everybody's best interests to force a quick decision by closing down the system.

The longer the strike lasts, the greater the danger of destructive splits on that issue within hospitals and health boards.

Nor is it clear if nurses have thought very much about how the wider industrial relations picture will change once they go out. Today 3,000 paramedics in IMPACT are meeting to consider their own outstanding pay instalment under the Programme for Competitiveness and Work.

SIPTU shop stewards representing the non-nursing grades in the health service are also keeping the situation under review. Non-consultant hospital doctors urgently seeking a shorter week may decide they are not going to work even harder during a nurses' strike.

All these groups, and others, will be carefully measuring their own response to the strike and could, conceivably, come out themselves. If they do, nurses could find themselves part of a bigger dispute, in which their interests would be only part of a final settlement.

Far from helping them assert their own interests, nurses could find themselves sidelined, as so often in the past. That could be bad for nurses and for the wider trade union movement.

Nurses are the largest professional group of women workers in Irish society. Many of them see the issues in this dispute to be as much about gender as industrial relations.

Every industrial agreement negotiated for nurses has been by men, including the current one. For many nurses, that explains why they are paid less than other health professionals and why general nurses - unlike psychiatric nurses, gardai and prison officers - don't have early retirement.

Even the Labour Court's otherwise sensitive approach to the issues angered many nurses, by deciding in its latest recommendation that, in future, nurse managers should report to general managers in the health service. The effect of this would be to demote nurses to middle management at a time when the Commission on Nursing has been calling for greater autonomy and better career paths.

Whether nurses would have done better historically if the profession had been predominantly male is irrelevant now. What nurses do not need, in their first major national strike, is to be subsumed in the greater, male-dominated trade union movement, as may well happen.

There is, of course, the question of the implications of the dispute for public service pay. Many nurses do not realise, or care, about the consequences of their dispute for Partnership 2000. While employers, including the Government, may not like that, they should wake up to the fact that growing numbers of workers are frustrated with the rigid nature of centralised bargaining which has characterised national agreements since 1987.

The term "social partnership" only entered the debate on national agreements in the lead-up to Partnership 2000, but there is a growing danger that "partnership" and pay restraint will become synonymous. IBEC's director-general, Mr John Dunne, has gone so far as to call pay restraint "the oil in the gearbox of the national agreement process".

For many workers who have only received the national pay rounds, that oil is beginning to feel increasingly like glue. That sentiment will strengthen next year when Partnership 2000 only holds out the prospect of a 1 per cent pay rise.

Of course, further tax cuts could sweeten the pill, but they depend on keeping public expenditure under control. That depends on holding the line on public service pay, which brings us back to the nurses' strike.

It may be that social partnership will have to take a back seat to old-fashioned free collective bargaining for a while. Someone should tell Mr Cowen that would not mean the end of civilisation as we know it.