Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has said the Government cannot meet the nurses' demand for a 10.5 per cent pay increase because to do so would see the collapse of the national pay agreements.
Speaking in the Dail today, Mr Ahern said there was "no mechanism" for resolving the nurse's pay claim because it "flies in the face" of the overall pay agreement.
"There is no resolution of that. We have a national agreement. . . .We cannot have two."
Mr Ahern said that to "concede to the nurses demand on pay would mean the end of pay policy and the collapse of the arrangements not just with the rest of the public service but with workers generally across the economy."
Responding to questions from Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny on whether the benchmarking process was flexible enough to resolve issues such as those at the heart of the nurses' dispute, Mr Ahern said that the Labour Court and the National Implementation Body had recommended that these issues would be best dealt with under benchmarking.
He said the terms of reference for the benchmarking process had already been agreed by the management and unions.
"The difficulty in this case, and there are lots of difficulties, is that a lot of the nurses have not signed up to 2016."
Mr Ahern said there only small number of nursing staff were in a situation where certain social worker grades are paid more and yet still report to nurses. He insisted these anomalies could be resolved where they occurred.
On the second demand from the nursing unions - the reduction of the working week to 35 hours - Mr Ahern was more optimistic that agreement could be reached. He said such a change would require a massive change for the health services and would see a reduction of 7.7 million nursing hours from the health service.
He said the problem was that the nursing unions wanted a final date for this changeover to happen, whereas those negotiating on the management side "rightly in my view, want to know how we are going to do it".
