Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

As we speak nurses and midwives, members of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, are meeting to discuss pay and staffing shortages. The national executive of the Psychiatric Nurses Association is also meeting today to consider the recent report of the Public Service Pay Commission. For years nurses, midwives and their unions have highlighted the recruitment and retention crisis in the health service. They have proposed reasonable and responsible solutions to address it, yet there has been complete disengagement from the Government on the issue.

The Public Service Pay Commission report was supposed to independently analyse and assess the crisis, its causes and how to address the problems. However, as the report conveys, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Donohoe, met the commission in October 2017 to emphasise that its work "is not a pay review nor can it be". It is clear that from the outset the Government was determined that a commission mandated to investigate both pay and conditions was to focus solely on conditions and to disregard pay. It appears as if it was determined to establish the conclusions of the report long before the work had even begun. In carrying out its international pay comparisons the report acknowledges the number of nurses and midwives who have chosen to work in Britain instead of Ireland. While acknowledging the fact that pay and conditions vary across England, the report failed to address adequately differences in pay between Ireland and London specifically, a popular destination for our nurses and where entry pay is more than €3,000 higher. A pay comparison that fails to address adequately one of the most popular destinations for our nurses is flawed.

Our nurses and midwives perform an invaluable service to patients in the health service and we should expect their jobs to pay well and to have high morale in their ranks. However, that is not the case. There is only one application for every four nursing and midwifery vacancies in the health service. In the meantime the Government does not wish to talk about pay, but that is the conversation that must take place. It wilfully ignores that this will only worsen the state of the health service and make it impossible to implement Sláintecare fully. All the while the bill for agency staff continues to spiral. In April, the Dáil passed a Sinn Féin motion calling for the introduction of recruitment and retention measures based on realistic proposals which would prioritise pay. It called on the Government to work with the unions to draw up a roadmap for pay equality and how that would be achieved for nurses and midwives, with an implementation plan to deliver pay equality within a short timeframe and not the eight-year timeframe the Government now proposes. Will the Taoiseach commit to acting and engaging with unions in order that nurses and other health professionals get a fair deal?

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