Mr. Paul Bell:

It may not be widely known that in some cases health workers had two distinctive periods of self-isolation. They may have been off themselves for a 14-day period due to the suspicion that they had Covid-19 and, having gone back to work, if someone they were in contact with or a family member was exposed to Covid-19, they had to have another 14-day period of self-isolation.

Employees in the healthcare sector work unsocial hours. The injustice is that they did not get paid premiums on which they were depending, sometimes including mandatory overtime payments. That is a matter that has been raised between the HSE and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and will feature in the Workplace Relations Commission. It is also the case that healthcare workers of various grades in certain settings had no access to any of those payments. That is predominantly the case in the private sector. What is most disappointing is that one major private hospital which received State funding during that period refused to apply the public sector formula to cover health workers when they were on Covid leave. That was most disappointing on the basis that taxpayers had paid for those hospitals to be available to assist during the Covid-19 crisis.