Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses for coming in today. I could also say thanks to the members of the INMO but everyone says that. There is never a bad word said about nurses. I do not know how many times people in my clinics in Swords, Balbriggan and elsewhere say that they do not know how nurses put up with it or how they do what they do. However, it is getting beyond the point of being reasonable at this stage. I was thinking earlier of the last moratorium on recruitment, of which Ms Ní Sheaghdha would have been aware. She and I would have worked together at that time. Again, it was the same story from Government in terms of denial. As Yogi Bear says, it is like déjà vuall over again.

It is right that we focus on patients, 603 of whom are on trolleys today, according to the INMO. We have already hit the 100,000 mark this year, which is an absolute shame on this Government, its policies and those who support it. I am interested in the impact on front-line staff. If one goes back to 2007, one of the issues that we would have raised at the time was the potential long-term impact of the moratorium. Has there been any recovery from the 2007 moratorium? I do not recall a massive uplift in recruitment in the interim that would have buffered us against this new moratorium. It is not just this year's moratorium but also the historic impact of the previous moratorium that we are dealing with now. If my memory serves me, the Government imposed a moratorium on the health service first and then on every other sector about two years later.