If Bertie hadn't gone to China we wouldn't be in this mess. Or so was the view of one seasoned veteran of public service pay battles as, on Wednesday evening, an audience of 400 health service managers watched Brian Cowen pull the shutters down on the pay elements of the Nursing Commission report.
The Government now has two options. It can have a bitter industrial dispute with the State's 31,000 nurses and then go limping to the Labour Court to have it settled, or it can skip the dispute and go straight into the negotiating phase of the exercise. Either way, there is a risk of what Health Minister Cowen chooses to call "leap-frogging claims", but the risk of such claims will be infinitely greater if a settlement with the nurses follows a strike in which the Government is seen to make concessions.
One lesson the Government should have learnt from its predecessor is that there is no point in trying to long-finger the nurses claim, as Ray Kavanagh, the general secretary of the Psychiatric Nurses Association, characterises it. The previous government delayed negotiations with the nursing unions in the hope it could wear them down and they would accept a modest pay deal.
The delaying tactics had precisely the opposite effect. Nurses were enraged at the strategy. The cost of assuaging their rage and determination to strike was a final settlement that cost £87 million, plus another £27 million in back money. That settlement also contained a commitment to a commission that would examine a host of issues which the Labour Court had neither the time nor the resources to attend to.
Nurses voted for the deal on the basis that their grievances would be addressed by the commission, including the outstanding pay issues. There are three of them; two are relatively simple. They involve allowances for extra qualifications held by staff nurses, similar to payments made to teachers, and an additional long-service increment.
The third is more problematic. It arises from the commission's proposals to upgrade ward sisters to clinical nurse managers, and to upgrade some staff nurses and midwives with special clinical expertise to scales similar to those of ward sisters and assistant matrons.
It will be impossible to carry out a radical restructuring of the nursing profession and health service without taking on board the pay elements. This is restructuring with a vengeance.
The Government seems to think the very act of entering into negotiations with the nursing unions or referring unresolved issues to the Labour Relations Commission and Labour Court will end national agreements as we know them. But the Government will be in an untenable position if it is involved in a confrontation with nurses because it refuses to use its own industrial relations system.
Despite Mr Cowen's constant talk about the need to remain within public service pay guidelines and involve the public service committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, the silence from that quarter has been deafening. ICTU knows a time bomb when it sees one.
Instead of adopting a begrudging attitude, the Government should be relieved the commission left the thorniest and most expensive item of all, early retirement, in the hands of the Public Service Pensions Commission.
Nurses are getting older and nursing, particularly in acute hospitals, is an occupation for the fit and the young. Prison officers have early retirement, gardai have early retirement and psychiatric nurses have early retirement. All of these are overwhelmingly male occupations. The Government could find itself on shaky ground in the EU Court of Justice if one of the nursing unions decided to take an equality case there.
Nursing morale is as low as in 1997, if not lower. Staff shortages in Dublin mean there are 200 beds closed in the city's major acute hospitals. Accident and emergency departments are overflowing and elective admissions are being cancelled wholesale.
An overworked, overstressed workforce is a volatile workforce. The decision to defer yet again the issue of pay will not help matters. It does not need much in that situation for Mr Cowen, however inadvertently, to give nursing militancy another kick start.
The longer the Government defers meeting the nursing unions to discuss the pay-related elements of the Nursing Commission report, the greater the danger of that militancy taking off. Mobilising nurses is easy: persuading them to accept a last-minute compromise is not.
If the Government is seen to break the promises it made to nurses in February 1997 to avert a strike then, who knows what it might take this time around?