AROUND a dozen NHS nurses in Belfast are working weekend shifts in hospitals in England, on triple pay and four-star expenses, via a private employment agency.
A dozen is not enough to affect hospital care in Northern Ireland, which has just come though its post-Christmas peak with less nail biting than usual.
However, the phenomenon is expensive enough to have earned disapproving headlines in the Mail on Sunday.
In a follow-up article in Monday’s Belfast Telegraph, Janice Smyth, Northern Ireland director of nurses’ union the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), said: “I was not aware of this but I am not surprised.
"I don’t know any of these nurses personally but nurses are really struggling financially. We know that a high percentage of them are struggling to pay their gas and electricity bills.”
This is such a remarkable statement that it deserves a thorough deconstruction.
Qualified nurses in Northern Ireland start on a basic salary of £21,478, progressing in seven annual increments to £27,901.
Adopting a specialisation puts them on the next pay band, which rises automatically to £34,530.
After that they become nurse managers on up to £40,558, which is a realistic goal in any nursing career. Beyond that are the sister and matron pay scales, topping out at £98,453.
All these figures exclude overtime payments, anti-social hours premiums, subsidised pension contributions and free university tuition.
In short, nurses are well paid - earning more than the median household income in Northern Ireland from the moment they start their first job.
If a high percentage of them are struggling to pay their gas and electricity bills, as the RCN claims, that can only be down to a mismanagement of their personal finances for which the taxpayer cannot be held responsible.
Making this claim in response to the Mail on Sunday story was even more bizarre, as the dozen nurses referred to were described as specialists, putting them in the top 20 per cent of Northern Ireland earners.
The RCN statement may have been a case of putting on the poor mouth but it was necessary to defend the general union position of nurses as public sector martyrs - an image also clearly found useful across the wider political left.
Similar positioning can be seen in the RCN’s current ‘Frontline First’ campaign for higher pay. Nationally, the union calls this a demand for “fair pay”.
The Northern Ireland branch is going one better, threatening to strike over “fair pay for Northern Ireland” because its members did not receive a one per cent raise awarded this year in Britain.
You would think from this that nurses were unfairly paid or that they were not still getting raises in Northern Ireland, both as annual increments and as cost-of-living increases at the top of each pay band.
You would also think the NHS’s salary bill - by far its largest cost - was a frontline service in itself, rather than just an overhead in frontline service delivery.
There is a fascinating contrast with the current campaign by junior doctors over pay and conditions, which focuses entirely on the value of their work. Like L’Oreal, doctors union the British Medical Association is proud to say “because you’re worth it”.
Meanwhile, nurses are trapped in a tired 1980s paradigm where they are supposed to be labouring down a metaphorical coal mine, motivated entirely by the goodness of their hearts.
There is no evidence that the public actually begrudges nurses a good wage.
However, the Mail on Sunday story is a straw in the wind that people are at last noticing the image of poor nurses is decades out of date. Union representatives still trading on that image may be needlessly stoking up a public backlash.
Another straw in the wind is the relatively muted support at Stormont for the RCN ‘fair pay’ campaign, given how politically sacrosanct the cause of nurses has usually been.
Perhaps MLAs have noticed they are being paid less than some nursing sisters - or that some matrons earn more than the health minister.
More broadly, successive health ministers must be thinking that if RCN pleads poverty no matter how well off its members become, paying them even more is a thankless waste of money. Better to devote the budget to real frontline service delivery, which means keeping the NHS salary bill firmly under control.
