Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Absolutely, we always engage with unions. That is the reason we have a public sector pay deal which was agreed less than a year ago. That deal runs for the next three years and it applies to all public servants in the country. It provides for pay increases every year for the next three years at a total cost to the taxpayer of €400 million last year. We made that agreement after engaging with unions and we intend to honour it. We certainly hope all the unions honour the agreement they made with the Government and Irish taxpayer. The agreement runs for three years and all public servants will receive pay increases every year. There are over €400 million worth of pay increases for public servants next year, which is about as much as we can afford. We do not wish to repeat the mistakes of the past and to start borrowing money to pay for pay increases. That is illusory. It would mean going back to the cycle of pay increases followed by pay cuts down the line.

The Public Service Pay Commission report is worth reading, and I am sure the Deputy has read it. It is based on facts and puts forward solutions. Those who are not interested in point scoring or exploiting industrial relations issues will find it very informative. It is independent, incidentally. It was not written by the Government or a civil servant or anybody in the Department of Finance. Anybody could make submissions and many people did so. The report sets out the facts. One of those facts is that the number of nurses working in the public health service has been increasing year on year for the past three years. It shows that pay is comparable with the UK and Europe and that Ireland has a high number of nurses per bed relative to other countries. These are the facts, not my opinion. They are set out in black and white in the Public Service Pay Commission report. The report also points out that many countries are struggling to recruit and retain nurses because there is an international shortage of nurses. Pay measures alone will not change that. Just as there are Irish nurses in Australia and the UK there are nurses in Ireland from the UK, Spain, India and all parts of the world. Those are the facts in the report.

One of the most pertinent facts we should not deny, because it is set out in the report and in the OECD figures, is that Ireland has more nurses per head of population than most countries in the world. It is in the top five or six. If one reduces the number of nurses per bed it is even higher. Any reforms must involve changes to how we deploy our nurses to ensure nurses are used in appropriate roles. For example, in Ireland nurses are doing jobs that would be done by theatre assistants or scrub technicians in the United States and we have nurses doing jobs in outpatient departments that would be done by other grades. Reform must involve those types of changes. Of course we are willing to engage on that type of reform. That is what Sláintecare is about, reform and not more of the same. If more nurses, more pay, more beds and more of the same was the solution we would be improving the health services now. We do not need more of the same but a different approach.

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