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

While I made the main points I wanted to make about the arts sector during Question Time with the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht this morning, I would like to put it to the Taoiseach that we need to urge the Abbey Theatre to engage with those who signed the letter we discussed this morning. It is quite a polarised and complicated debate. All of the different stakeholders need to get together to sort out these issues.

However, at the back of it - this is where the Government comes in - all across the theatre, art and film sectors, which I have been talking about repeatedly for the past year, there is no job security, income security, no rights or entitlements and no jobs. There is just total precarity. The Government needs to address that. In Germany, a person who works in the arts is effectively a public servant and has public service conditions, whereas in Ireland, the land of saints of scholars, we treat artists with contempt. That is the problem and the Taoiseach needs to address it.

Has the Taoiseach's Cabinet committee on social policy and public sector reform addressed the fact that an industrial action by the National Ambulance Service, which will have serious consequences, is due to take place on 22 January? It involves a serious matter regarding trade union recognition whereby the HSE is refusing to engage with the National Ambulance Service Representative Association, NASRA, which is affiliated to the Psychiatric Nurses Association, PNA, or recognise its right to represent ambulance workers. As a consequence of that, a national ambulance strike will take place on 22 January. The Taoiseach has talked a good deal about urging negotiation in terms of the nurses' dispute. I strongly urge him to contact the HSE and tell it that workers have the right to choose their own trade union and that it should engage urgently with the PNA and NASRA to avert a national ambulance strike on 22 January.

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