Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I would like to come back to the lack of movement. I have had the health brief for about a year and a half and some things were soon very obvious to me. They will be very obvious members of this committee who have been doing this for longer than I have. One of these things was the fact that the financial emergency measures in the public interest, FEMPI, legislation applying to GPs needs to be reversed. Many people have pushed for that and it is beginning to be reversed. Another was a stance taken by the nurses and midwives. Things needed to be done there and movement was achieved. They did not get everything they wanted but there has been movement and provisioning in the budgets for that. Another thing that obviously must happen immediately is that new entrant pay inequality must be eliminated for consultants. We are running out of doctors. To the best of my knowledge there has been no movement on that. Is movement happening behind the scenes, out of all of our sight, or are consultants hitting a brick wall with the Government?