Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I know that the Deputy would never mean to be flippant but regarding her comments on the ribbon cutting at Connolly Hospital, I answered a question on this last week and will repeat the response today. The opening of Connolly Hospital this summer, at the end of July, will result in an additional 6,000 children being seen through outpatient clinics there. Additional children will benefit from the opening of this facility this year. It is a facility which when it opens for a full year will cater for 33,000 additional appointments. It is not overdue and I appreciate the Deputy saying that. The answer remains as it was last week in that I am waiting to hear back from Children's Health Ireland on its decision about opening hours. From memory of the question last week, all the nursing posts have been identified and significant recruitment has been made in the area of consultants.

Importantly, it is not just me, the Government or the HSE which is saying that the nurse's deal will help with recruitment or retention; the INMO is also saying that. This was stated clearly at its annual conference in Trim two weeks ago, which I attended along with the director general. The union genuinely believes that this deal will help us retain our nurses, which is the metric by which we can measure the success of the deal, if we are honest. For the third year in a row we will offer every nurse graduate a full-time job in the health service, which is the easy bit; the challenge is retaining them. As the INMO acknowledges, we are training more nurses than ever and we are training enough of them, but we are not retaining them. Where we offer every nurse graduating a full-time job we must ask how many are still in the health service after several months or years. That is how we will judge the deal's success or otherwise. Now that the deal has been just accepted by the INMO we will move to the implementation phase. We will have to establish structures and these will have union representation. It is important to acknowledge that the deal includes nurses working in new and different ways. It talks about flexible working, changes to contracts and new contracts etc. -----