Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

If the Government is not concerned about the individual cost to nurses it should be concerned about the impact this is having on our health service because the motion correctly points out the correlation between the decrease in staffing levels and the increase in workload, which is a huge strain on the service, on those working in it and on all of us who need to access a hospital. The commission on nurses pay is due to publish recommendations in June and has to be cognisant of the strain that the nursing profession has been under since 2012 and has to take steps to reverse this damage. The recruitment embargo and the decision to reduce the starting salaries of graduate nurses and midwives has undoubtedly had a massive negative effect on recruitment and retention and the continued failure to address this means that the profession has become less attractive. It is an incredibly big request to expect somebody to be a nurse, a very demanding job, against the backdrop of an average industrial wage of €37,000 with the starting salary of €28,600. A person could not rent a room or get their children into childcare in this city on wages at that level. The INMO this year highlighted the aggressive recruitment of Irish nurses by UK hospitals and the Health Service Executive, HSE, is not competing on pay and conditions. The education of these individuals is funded by the Irish taxpayer and that is handed over to hospitals in the UK. It is probably just as well that they have to look after many of our women who we send over there for treatment but that is a different story.

While Irish nurses consider leaving for better wages elsewhere we are left with two serious consequences: the inflow of nursing staff from other countries and the outsourcing of work to agency staff at a higher cost. The inflow of nurses from other countries, generally developing countries, has had an impact on those countries of origin in that they lose the skills to this country, where we have a highly trained workforce and should not have a shortage of medical staff. This is appalling. It is a practice that is shunned by the International Labour Organization because it creates a brain drain in some of the poorest countries in the world, which most need the profession.

We also have the truly wasteful policy of outsourcing and what the new buzzword calls "self-employment" at a higher cost to the HSE. This is an overall pattern. One in five in the education sector are now on temporary contracts and this is being replicated in the health sector. According to this mythical "self-employed" category, one in ten workers in health and social work are self-employed. These are professional occupations which are being pushed into the category of insecure work. If we do not address it now it will have an impact on the health service even greater than it has already had, not to mind the enormous cost to those individuals who take on that work.

See this speech in context