Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We support the motion as others have done. I will start by stating the obvious that we have a crisis in our health system in all sectors, including in accident and emergency departments, the care of the elderly and other vulnerable sections of society, and in mental health services.

There are two basic reasons for that crisis. The first is ideology of the current and past governments that deliberately set up a two-tier health service, systematically encouraging the privatisation of vital healthcare. We have poor public healthcare and poor public hospitals to ensure we have a blooming private healthcare sector that can maximise profits. We shower them with tax breaks and incentives and increasingly use the private sector to deal with public patients. We have invested a great deal of effort and money in ensuring that private health care is the cover that most ordinary people desire as a necessity because they see the public healthcare system in such a crisis. The queues across all our key services, the waiting times for treatments, scans and therapy including speech and language services for children, the home care hours, help for the elderly in the home and the trolley crisis are not a series of unfortunate events but the predictable result of a policy of privatisation, designed to force people into the private sector.

The other reason for the crisis is the one addressed in this motion - the attempt by this and the previous governments to blame the recession on public sector workers and to use the recession as an excuse to put the boot into them all, particularly the nurses, midwives and other healthcare workers. We cannot have a decent healthcare service while putting the workers who provide that service into intolerable situations of cuts, closed wards and worsening conditions in which they have to work.

Nurses are also required to work an extra shift every month for free in crowded and understaffed hospital and emergency wards. We worsen their pay and conditions and we create a two-tier pay structure that discriminates against newly qualified staff doing exactly the same work. The recent Public Services Stability Agreement did not address these issues. Pay restoration is still not a reality and workers are earning less than they were before the recession. There is no real solution for workers when rents and housing costs are rising. They are being forced out of the country as clearly illustrated by the letter we all received from the Psychiatric Nurses Association today.

It seems to be difficult for any Government to acknowledge that the inequality in pay and the brutal conditions under which nurses and midwives are forced to work, contribute to the health crisis. It is extraordinary that we find it so difficult to acknowledge that the pay of nurses and midwives needs to be increased when we can increase our own pay and the pay of bankers overnight. Thanks be to God there are more of them than us, but the visuals of that inequality are stark.

Those Deputies who have supported the FEMPI legislation and nodded and winked when it has been renewed every year bear a responsibility for the continuation of that legislation and its contribution to the crisis in our health service because it abuses nurses and midwives. FEMPI has to go.

5 o’clock

It was an extraordinarily blunt instrument and has outlived its purpose. With that pay equality and a complete change in the way we treat our health service workers must be ushered in. We lost the whole child and adolescent mental health service, CAMHS, unit for six months of last year in Cherry Orchard Hospital, as the Minister of State well knows, because of a failure to retain psychiatric nurses. That will happen again and again. This crisis is in some ways only beginning because of the shortage of nurses. If we begin by paying them properly and giving them the respect they deserve we might begin to address the crisis.

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