The Nursing Alliance will face an uphill task convincing some of its members to accept the Labour Court recommendations, with many striking members rejecting it yesterday as an insult to nurses.
This was in contrast to the unanimous approach adopted by the leadership of the four nursing unions in deferring the pickets pending the ballot result and recommending the Labour Court package.
"We told our strike committee to fax the INO and tell them we are not accepting it, and that we are angry," a Psychiatric Nurses' Association member picketing outside the Mater Hospital in Dublin said. "I think we should have gone for an all-out strike from the beginning and we would not still be here now."
"I think it is laughable," a INO colleague said. "It is an insult to all nurses. There is a very strong feeling here that we should stay on the picket line until we have our say."
If the nurses had been balloted yesterday the Labour Court recommendations would have been rejected, a spokesman for the Mater strike committee said. "But if there are information meetings and we see and hear more about the proposals, people might be more pragmatic and the result might be different."
However, the picketers outside the hospital thought the ballot would reject the deal.
The Mater strike committee spokeswoman said the deal failed to address the key issues. There were more than 500 nurses in the Mater whose years of service would qualify them for the proposed senior staff nurse position, but just 2,500 such posts were proposed nationally, she said. The proposal also failed to address the issue of pay for ward sisters.
The offer of an overtime rate of time-and-a-sixth pay for work between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. was also criticised by nurses. It was £1 after tax for the two-hour period, a SIPTU member at the Mater said. "It would not pay for the bus home in the evening," she said. "We have been made fools of," she said of the emergency nursing cover without pay. "I worked two 12-hour shifts and got nothing for it."
The initial reaction on the picket line at the Rotunda was more positive. Elements of the package were reasonable and there was enough on offer to justify calling off their strike, picketers said.
"I have not heard anyone say they want to stay out picketing when the ballot is being taken," according to a hospital strike committee member, Ms Maggie Williams.
A spokeswoman for Beaumont Hospital's nurses' strike committee said the initial reaction was "shock and horror". "We are very dissatisfied. We were out for nothing," she said.
A member of the strike committee at St Michael's Hospital in Dun Laoghaire, Ms Mary Frances O'Driscoll, said nurses were angry and unhappy with the package.
"Overall there's a feeling that there's very little in the package and it appears that things have been shuffled round a bit."
Ms Joe Butler, a night superintendent, said the nurses' outrage was hard to control in the committee room. She said the proposals were "a raw deal for staff nurses. They are going backwards instead of forward."
The strike committee at the Coombe Hospital said there were mixed feelings about the recommendations. Ms Siobhan Mac Guill said most nurses wanted to stay on strike until a ballot was taken, but would follow the course recommended by the INO.