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

It is extraordinary to listen to the Taoiseach's answer on the health service: one would think everything is improving. We are facing industrial action by thousands of nurses from the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation and the Psychiatric Nurses Association of Ireland. Incredibly, the Taoiseach's Cabinet committee on health has not met since November despite facing industrial action by the nurses. When he comments on the matter, he seems intent on criticising the nurses for taking industrial action. He fails to recognise, however, that Government policy has produced this crisis and forced nurses into a position where they feel they must take industrial action. He continues to peddle the myth that there is no retention problem for nurses, but the truth needs to be said. For every four nursing vacancies, there is only one application. Some 5% fewer nurses work in the health service than did in 2008, while the number of managers has increased by 40%.

Nurses are earning €7,000 less at every point of their career than similar graduate professionals working in the health service. The Taoiseach touts pay increases which are actually restoration of cuts that his party proposed and that remain not fully restored ten years after the austerity assault on public sector workers, including nurses, was launched. He does not acknowledge that nurses give up an hour and a half for free to the health service, or the costs resulting from overcrowding, waiting lists and cancelled operations because there are not enough nurses to staff the hospitals. Rather, there are myths about the cost of what nurses are demanding, despite €2 million a week being paid to agency nurses and overseas recruitment firms being paid €10,000 per nurse recruited because the Government will not directly employ staff nurses. All the costs of cancellations in the health service result from chronic staff shortages which in turn result from our failure to recruit enough nurses or retain them because the Government will not pay them properly. Will the Taoiseach face up to the reality of what is going on, talk to nurses, listen to them and concede to their just and legitimate demands?

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