DO Irish nurses want or do Irish nurses not want to set up picket lines outside Irish hospitals? That the question should even be posed will come as a shock to some readers. Because people, on the whole, are intensely sentimental about nurses.
Men, especially. It is very pleasing to come out of hospital alive instead of dead, of course, and the focus of thankfulness is often the nurse. Andy then, they're nurturing and caring and all those maternal things, without any of the running emotional balance sheet associated with real mothers.
And on top of that they're seemingly ideal employees always ready to run for a chart or proffer a cup of tea or swish in and out with a hi tech machine they can play like a violin. During ward rounds they stand behind the consultant as he proceeds from bed to bed, wearing a complicated expression on their faces that signals competence, but meek competence. God forbid there should be anything uppity about them. They're the last of the women who know their place.
Which is why it is going to be interesting to see whether they go on strike or not. Many of them certainly believe they are in a mood to. They have not been the most politicised of work forces, nurses, and I'm told that union meetings are usually poorly attended. But recently, a rally in Dublin to prepare for strike action attracted well over 2,000 nurses.
It was so packed that the hall probably broke every fire and safety rule. The gardai had to come in and threaten to wheel clamp the hundreds and, hundreds of cars that had been left on double yellow lines by nurses mad to get in.
The last time anyone really contemplated the nurses and did something for them was 1979-80 when Charles J. Haughey was Minister for Health. Remember all that? Charlie's Angels? Since then, nursing has become more and more professionalised. But pay and conditions have stayed in another age.
Take this example a senior secretary working in hospital administration can make about £17,000 a year. A nurse could make that, but only by working nights and weekends. A newly qualified midwife someone who after five years of training and experience is now taking real, weighty decisions, such as a secretary never has to take earns £13,800 a year. It is not much.
BUT it isn't grinding poverty, either. The nurses did have cars to go to the rally in. And whatever anomalies there are, the nurses are social partners" the same as the rest of us, and they signed up for the Programme for Competitiveness and Work which is meant to regulate pay over these years. If that programme is put aside for the nurses, it will affect a very large number of people. Not to mention that there are a lot of nurses to start with. There are about 30,000 of them. So even a small pay increase would cost the State a lot.
Most people can't even imagine what a nurse's strike would be like. They think that a nurse can no more go on strike than a wife or a mother can. It is true that if they do go on strike, we will never be able to feel patronisingly cosy about them again.
They'll be revealed as tough minded, career conscious people who expect good basic pay and appropriate reward for extra qualifications people for whom the care of the patient is labour, not delight. We will have to adjust to this particular army of labourers insisting that they are worthy of the hire.
But there are those who feel that even thinking about striking, or talking about striking, has taken the bloom off Irish nurses. It should never have come to this, they say. The Irish nurse, they say, is a quite exceptionally able and obliging person. A matron I know cannot praise her staff too highly. They absolutely invariably put the patient's welfare before their own, she says.
They'll turn their hand to anything. They'll organise a theatre, assist at the operation and then be the ones to mop up the floor. They are as confident in their dealings with doctors as with patients because they come from all classes in society and can relate to all classes. They are multi skilled they'll hold the hand of someone, who's crying her eyes out one minute, and do complex blood gases the next.
Off their own bat they study for extra qualifications in family planning, in AIDS nursing, in bereavement therapy even though they won't get an extra penny in pay. And they'll always stay late in an emergency. They don't clock watch any more than they bother about the exact demarcation of their role in the health service.
You can see that a workforce like this is an administrator's dream. But I don't see why nurses can't be the paragons she says they are and still go on strike. Why would going on strike change their view of themselves? It would change her view of them, and our view of them, but it wouldn't necessarily change their view of what nursing is and what a nurse should be.
I THINK she feels that a nurse's self image is based on an ideal of service which is incompatible with putting patient care at risk in pursuit of a pay claim. And perhaps she is right. Perhaps this is the end of the era where nurses put the caring and serving and selfless aspects of their work before pay and status. Or perhaps for a long time they got status from something else besides pay.
I have often watched them at work, and they move around the hospitals with the deftness and confidence and light footed energy that women otherwise command only in their own kitchens. They belong to their work environment, whereas many much better paid professional women constantly betray an unhappy alienation from their workplaces and from their colleagues.
But if they gain a certain amount of ease and strength from working mostly with other women, they are also low paid because they're women. And not just low paid in money, but in respect, too. Look ate the teachers and how effectively they get what they want. Look at how they're setting up early retirement deals because they "burn out". Whereas a nurse in, say, a long stay hospital, is doing hard, physical work until she's 65 with no thought of early retirement.
Ah well, "nursing is a vocation, not a job," people say. And "aren't they wonderful?" I suppose some of them are wonderful. But they didn't train to be wonderful and they aren't paid for being wonderful. They're paid for doing a job which has elements of wonder, certainly, but is also down to earth. Sure, you couldn't pay them for what they do," people also say. Smugly.
But the point is, you could pay them. That is what society does with the jobs it values. It pays for them. In the next few weeks, the nurses may say that we must pay them. I don't welcome industrial action anywhere, much less in the area of health. But maybe the nurses should put down a marker. They're not angels, they might remind us. They have to eat, too.