Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation is meeting, as we speak, to consider possible industrial action over the failure of the Taoiseach's Government to recognise the pay crisis at the heart of a complete inability to recruit nurses into the public health service and the consequent crisis in that health service. Pay and conditions are so terrible that, for every four nursing jobs advertised, one application is received. The Taoiseach refuses to take on board the need to increases nurses' pay significantly.

Teachers, having rejected the Government's plans not to restore pay equality for new entrant teachers, are engaging in and potentially escalating industrial action. I commend both groups because they have no choice but to fight for better pay if we are to recruit the nurses and teachers we need to provide staff in the public health service and education system. Is the problem - this is related to our earlier discussion - that much of the reason nurses and teachers have to demand and fight for extra pay and are not willing to work in these jobs at current pay rates is that their pay will not allow them to put a roof over their heads? When the Taoiseach says we just need to ramp up supply and that it is okay to sell public land to private developers to build houses at market prices, he fails to recognise that building houses nobody, including teachers and nurses, can afford when they cannot afford to pay rent either is pointless. It was that approach to housing that led to the last economic crash. It is not for ideological but practical reasons that we insist that the State needs to build public and affordable housing on public land because market prices are impossible to meet for ordinary working people.

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