The Nursing Alliance's decision on Wednesday evening to defer hospital pickets pending the outcome of a ballot on the Labour Court recommendations averted a course of action which industrial relations experts believe would otherwise have tarnished nurses' reputation and undermined public support for their strike.

Had the pickets remained, the nurses would have joined gardai and soldiers on the list of professionals whose public image has been tarnished in recent years. The "blue flu" bruised public confidence in the former, the spate of deafness claims eroded respect for the latter.

"The nurses came within a hair's breadth of damaging themselves, but in the end were sensible enough to withdraw," according to the dean and senior lecturer in industrial relations and sociology at the National College of Ireland, Ranelagh, Mr Michael Barry.

"Nine days is a colossal length of time for a nurses' strike. If they stayed out any longer and dead bodies started to appear, public support would have eroded very fast."

The nurses enjoyed the advantage of a strong core support, according to industrial relations public relations expert Mr Pat Montague. That remained firm for the early part of the strike, with a Sunday Independent/IMS poll taken on the third day showing 66 per cent support for the nurses.

However, by day nine, Mr Montague said he detected a subtle shift in the public attitude to the dispute. "People were beginning to get discommoded and were starting to blame the nurses for it."

While the picketers enjoyed a remarkable level of support throughout the dispute, that would have changed dramatically if they had decided to continue picketing during the ballot, Mr Montague believes. They will also face a very difficult time if they reject the Labour Court recommendations.

In reality, the public relations battle for the hearts of the public has been a phoney war to date, Mr Montague believes. "The Government has not trained its guns on the nurses as it did in other disputes such as the `blue flu', " he notes.

However, that would change in the event of the nurses rejecting the Labour Court proposals. In such circumstances the Government would have the PR advantage. The latest proposals are the fourth set of recommendations presented to resolve the dispute, during which time the nurses have repeatedly outlined their demands.

If nurses were to return to the picket lines in the coming days, they would have no new case to present. "The initiative in terms of telling stories would lie with the Government, which has not told its side yet. The nurses would be on the defensive," according to Mr Montague, who advised the INO during the 1996 and 1997 industrial relations negotiations.

In addition to having to explain why they were back on the pickets, they would be faced with the physical effects of the strike, making it very difficult to protect their public image.

A rejection of the Labour Court recommendation would also undermine the nurses' position in the longer run. A loss of public support would reduce their influence in the political domain, and in any future national wage negotiations. "The nurses should reflect on this," Mr Montague said. "They should not underestimate that they now have more credits and power within the context of the next negotiating programme."

The INO - the largest union in the Nursing Alliance - is confident the image of nurses has not been tarnished by the dispute. In fact, it believes it has been strengthened.

"The Government started out in this dispute thinking that nurses would not be able to provide emergency cover and run hospitals," INO press officer Ms Gina Moloney said. "But if the strike has highlighted anything, it has highlighted the professionalism of nurses."

The INO believes the media searched at national and local level for shortcomings in the emergency cover provided by nurses. It was amazing, Ms Moloney said, that so few problems were found.

In the wake of their first national strike, nurses would never again be taken for granted, she said. "The image of the angel of mercy and the pursuer of a vocational career has been tarnished and that is no bad thing," Ms Moloney said. "Nurses are women with families and real people with mortgages. Their career is a career, not a vocation - vocations are for nuns."

Nurses at the Mater Hospital in Dublin this week complained the media had ignored the fact that they had left the picket lines to assist in a heart-transplant operation. They had also assisted in the treatment of 13 people injured in a local bed and breakfast fire last weekend.

These incidents and other services provided free of charge might have helped shore up public support for the nurses, but they went unreported because the Nursing Alliance did not inform the media of them. Ms Moloney said these were not reported to the media because they were just part of the work nurses did everyday.

Mr Montague believes there would have been a danger in pursuing a public campaign highlighting the merits of nurses on the picket lines. Once the ICTU became involved in trying to find a resolution, the Nursing Alliance would have tried to move its members from "the war path to the resolution path", he said.

"There is no point in them revving up their people when they are trying to get them to think about compromise. There is conditioning going on."

TAKING a longer-term view, Mr Barry questions the Nursing Alliance's wisdom in pursuing a State-wide strike. "The nurses have been very strong," he said. "They are like a group of workers who have woken up and flexed their industrial muscles. But they quickly became like bulls in a china shop, in danger of wrecking the place."

Any group of workers who decided to forgo the option of taking industrial action was inviting exploitation. This exploitation increased because they were a female-dominated workforce, he believes.

While the threat of industrial action brought them so far, he believes the decision to go for a State-wide strike was mistaken. If he had been advising the nurses, he would have recommended a more selective use of the strike option, perhaps involving one-day strikes, rotated between regions around the State.

"By moving the strike around the country you could have created quite a bit of chaos, without the potential disruption of the `blue flu', which could have ricocheted back on them," Mr Barry said.

Eamon Timmins can be contacted at etimmins@irish-times.ie