Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

The refusal of the Government to award nurses a decent wage increase and a reduced working week stands in absolute contrast to how this same Government facilitates extremely privileged groups to rip off the taxpayer left, right and centre. This same Government will not pay nurses for critical life-saving work, but it raised the fees of senior barristers at the planning tribunal from an already massive €1,700 per day to €2,500 per day. That has given them, at taxpayers' expense, as much money in three weeks as a critical care nurse earns in an entire year, yet the Government now proposes to take the moral ground with taxpayers' funds.

The Government allowed senior consultants rip off the health service to the amount of tens of millions of euro in the PPARS fiasco. It did not raise a finger in ten years to stop its friends, namely, speculators, developers and landlords, amass obscene riches at the expense of ordinary working people through land speculation, profiteering in housing and rack-renting. However, citizens who fall seriously ill will not want at their side a senior planning barrister nor a computer consultant, and they will certainly not want a speculator, a developer or a landlord. They will want a kind and qualified nurse, yet the Government takes a cudgel to hammer this group's demand for decent wages and a reduced working week, while allowing free rein to those for whom greed is the driving force.

I support nurses, the healers and the life savers, just as I detest parasite speculators and others who have enriched themselves enormously as a result of the policies of this Government. The Minister for Health and Children really does have a brass neck. She stated that fairness demands that we put patients first, avoiding at all costs inconvenience, distress, disturbance and delays for patients and their families. These are the problems which the Government and the HSE visit daily on hundreds of thousands of patients and their families in many accident and emergency rooms and in many hospitals throughout the country. It failed to honour a promise to deliver thousands of extra hospital beds that were drastically cut in the 1980s. It failed to fund properly the health service. The Government does not have any moral authority to lecture nurses. It should pay nurses and cut back on some of the goodies thrown to its privileged millionaire friends at the expense of the taxpayer.

See this speech in context