Reunion of Class of '79, major teaching hospital, Dublin
Fifty people invited, thirty-something thirty-somethings turn up. All female, in line with the times. When Aretha Franklin blasts sweet soul with a touch of malice in the background, everyone sings along. "R-E-S-PE-C-T". You probably know it.
Only six women there are still nursing. Not enough respect, they explain. Many have gone on to "better" things: £30K plus expenses jobs as medical reps; running employment agencies, managing farms; usually having children in the meantime. All are good country girls, or daughters of the urban middle class. Such was the culture.
"Don't mess with women in uniform," a brunette warns. She toughed it out in UK and Saudi hospitals, earned enough to buy a house in 1992 and got a job as a staff sister in Dublin. She couldn't do it now. Twenty years on, the profile of student nurses is changing to include a few more men and working-class women. But the pecking order remains the same.
The pecking order observes a strict etiquette. Within hospitals, it ranks nurses somewhere above orderlies and cleaners but well below medical and scientific staff. Every detail of daily life reminds you where you stand.
Leadership training at staff nurse level helps senior nurses steer the rest of them along. Nurses want a greater management involvement, and no one is prepared to say why they shouldn't have it in principle. Small involvements have already been agreed. But real change happens slowly. Real change means you have to fight.
It's the pecking order in public sector pay that makes the nurses' case a social signpost. Jobs and professions tied to each other in a three-legged race mean no one can change their starting position. Calling the principle "relativity" gives it a scientific aura, but in effect it's a means of keeping the status quo. The system is going down the dustpipe, and nurses are shouting "Stop".
Back at the reunion, stories start spinning. There's the one about the consultant who was consistently late for patients, communicated badly with them, left the resulting messes to the nurses and then swanned into the ward that Christmas with one bottle of wine to be shared between the 10 nurses who had cleaned up for him all year, as they saw it.
Then there's the issue of further education. "Take an extra course on top of your three-year degree and two-year postgraduate qualifications, and you earn the princely sum of £21 extra a month," a serving nurse reports.
Some of the reunited think that between long hours, no childcare reliefs, low status and having to soak up the bile of anxious patients, cranky relatives and consultants who earn eight times what you do, nursing isn't worth it any more. All say you are exploited because you make it a point of honour to respect your patients, whatever else is going on. One adds (a few gins later) that you'll afford to make a career out of nursing if you hook up to a partner who earns enough to subsidise you.
Otherwise, the consensus recalls Noel Coward's advice to Mrs Worthington: "Don't put your daughter on the stage," even if she or he is talented enough to go the distance.
Nursing, we know, was traditionally a gendered activity, and because the gender was female it was undervalued. Caring work was, is, seen as a kind of philanthropy, with connotations more to do with charity than professionalism. The problem for the nursing unions is that they are discovering the hard way that their members have passed the point where receiving a handmade card from child patients or a box of chocolates on their discharge is enough to cancel out the effects of having such a low status in such a caste-based system.
Nurses expected successive governments over the last 20 years to address their case on its merits, and were taken aback when they were left alone. Nursing moved up a little, after the report of the Commission on Nursing, and changes in nursing education encouraged by it and by the Minister for Health. These initiatives happened since the current pay row last reached crisis level in early 1997.
But they are told they are confined in what they can realistically hope to achieve. Their case is considered relative to gardai and prison officers, rather than taking its measure from that of other healthcare professionals. Internal tensions within the healthcare system make it more complicated. Nurses' complaints clearly relate not only to pay but to work practices and attitudes, too.
Scaremongers argue that making extra concessions to the nurses will open floodgates of claims and counterclaims. It probably will, so long as Government and the Civil Service insist on operating a system they first introduced around the time of the 1970s oil crisis.
But with every trade union sharpening its wish list for the new deal on pay, it is naive to assume the Government is not considering changes to old strategies, whatever their platitudes when they make a public comment. The difficulty for nurses is that they are a relatively new force within the trade union movement, with all the uncertainty that goes with it.
Their strength is that the general public instinctively values them, believe that nurses have given the best possible service they could in the circumstances, and understands exactly why they are so fed up at being fobbed off for so long.
Nurses' anger won't be solved by any one pay deal. What the Government faces now is a major case of whistle-blowing, born of long years of neglect of the health and hospital services. Nurses are the lightning-rod for all sorts of other problems that were left to fester and turn in on themselves. No beds, or not enough. Waiting lists longer than the time it takes to fly a thousand supersonic flights around the world. Management systems that lag well behind the demands being placed on them from all quarters. Patients who want their experiences to end as happily as Casualty or ER.
Now the anger is turning outwards. The pay claim is not only about better working lives and career paths for the nursing profession. Contented employees do not round on their employers in this way. In turn, good employers detect and defuse hostility before it can reach crisis point.
This palpable frustration tells the Government how urgently it needs to acknowledge the clinically-depressed state of so much of the State's health services. That may explain the chronic fatigue and the real discontent in these front-line staff.
Sing it, Aretha.