Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister, the Minister of State and their officials. I have complained to the Minister previously about the absence of women in the room when his Department has been present, so I am delighted to welcome two women to the top table this morning and to acknowledge that there are other female officials in the audience as well. There is a great deal of talent among women in the public service, but having that recognised fully in the Department of Finance has been difficult.

My second point affects both of our constituencies. We all know that there are large numbers of young people who are either in college or have finished it and who are from ethnic minorities or have come from countries around the world to live in my constituency, which is the Minister's home area, and in his constituency, which is in many ways my home area. I hope that the Department has a policy, through its influence on the recruitment process, to ensure that those young people, many of whom have done excellently in school and college, have a share of the opportunity to be recruited into the public service. Some 30% of the people in various parts of Dublin are not originally from Ireland. They or their parents came to live here. In this light, it is time that we saw the fantastic diversity that exists in Dublin reflected in recruitment policy. Just as it is odd not to see women present at the top table, it is equally odd not to see the diversity of Ireland. It would be a reflection of our success story.

I wish to ask about public service pay and section 39 organisations. I am concerned about the hospice movement. There are hospices in all of our major cities and right around the country, with several in Dublin. There is a major hospice in Cork. Since hospice staff members are employees of organisations governed by section 39 rules, they have been unable to access the increases that the Minister referred to in the context of the public pay restoration programme. That programme has been long overdue and I was a part of the Government that introduced it, but I am disappointed that it does not cover the people who work in section 39 organisations, including organisations that provide vital services to persons in the broader health sector like Rehab, the Irish Wheelchair Association and the Irish Hospice Association. Unless the Minister finds a solution, at the end of the two-year period, which will be soon, there will be a 3% negative differential between the pay of a nurse who works in a hospice and one who has stayed working in a hospital, perhaps one that is close by or even on the same campus. The same will hold true across sectors where there are health professionals, allied professions and others. They are waiting.

There were moves to establish a process, but the Department has stated that it is unsure about who took the cuts. Almost every nurse or doctor in those institutions took the cuts in a spirit of helping the country in its darkest hour when the finances had collapsed. Now they find that they are being told that they cannot have the cuts reinstated. It will pose a major difficulty to recruitment and retention. There is a worldwide shortage of health professionals, teachers and so on. They are getting plenty of offers from a range of countries around the world, some of which are aggressively recruiting them. If there is a hard crash-out Brexit by the UK, the UK will recruit aggressively for almost all categories of public service staff. Currently, those are being recruited from the wider European Union.

Has the Minister a solution to this unfair situation? People in vital, publicly funded health and other services are not getting pay restoration. In a relatively short time, they will have a 3% minus differential compared with other people working in the hospital next door.