Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This week, balloting for industrial action began among more than 40,000 nurses and midwives. This is a mark and a measure of the desperation and frustration of nurses and midwives. The Minister for Finance, by way of response to this ballot, is hard-balling nursing and midwifery staff by claiming that their pay demands would compromise budgetary policy. He made this claim just two days after the Taoiseach promised a €3 billion tax cut at the Fine Gael Ard-Fheis. The threat of industrial action by nurses and midwives is the inevitable consequence of this Government's failure to deal with the recruitment and retention crisis in our health service and among nursing staff in particular. For years now nurses, midwives and their unions have highlighted this recruitment and retention crisis and have proposed reasonable and responsible solutions to address it but there has been complete disengagement from the Government on the issue.

Our nurses and midwives, as everyone will agree, provide an invaluable service to patients in our health system and we should expect that their jobs pay well. We should also expect high morale in their ranks but that is not the case. Nurses are justifiably frustrated at the current state of affairs. It is little wonder that there is just one application for every four nursing and midwifery vacancies in the health service. That in itself tells the story. All the while, the Taoiseach and the Ministers for Finance and Health do not want to talk about the issue of pay but they must. We have a very troubling situation now with desperate and frustrated nurses and midwives on one side and a Government that is happy to resort to megaphone diplomacy rather than direct engagement on the other.

In April, the Dáil passed a Sinn Féin motion calling for the introduction of recruitment and retention measures based on realistic proposals, with the prioritisation of pay. It called on the Government to work with the unions to draw up a roadmap to full pay equality for nurses and midwives, with an implementation plan to deliver that equality within a short timeframe and not the eight year period proposed by the Government. Will the Taoiseach now commit to acting on that motion? Will the Government engage with the unions to ensure that nurses and health professionals get a fair deal and we are not facing into industrial relations chaos?

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