Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Labour Party will be 100% supporting the nurses in their action. I welcome the INMO representatives in the Gallery and I acknowledge the PNA which is also represented. It is a sorry day that it has come to this point. I have no doubt the senior Minister needs to be away from the Chamber for personal time and I 100% appreciate that. I am glad the Minister of State is here because he is a person who listens.

I want to refer to some of the statistics relating to the current position. Close on 110,000 people were on trolleys in 2018 due to understaffing. The Government also knows there is under-capacity as well as understaffing in the health service. Some 7,000 procedures were cancelled in 2018 due to understaffing. These are INMO figures. There are more than 1,700 fewer staff nurses in Ireland than there were a decade ago. A fee of €10,000 has been paid to overseas recruitment firms for each nurse recruited. Some 60% of nurses who registered in 2017 were migrant nurses. Some 71% of Ireland's nursing and midwifery students are considering leaving Ireland according to a survey carried out last year. In the past decade the number of nurses has declined by 4%. The accumulation of all those figures shows that we have a dramatic and a serious issue when it comes to nursing and midwifery in this country.

I am glad Fianna Fáil put forward this motion as it gives us an opportunity to speak on this issue. It is laudable but I find it ironic given Deputy Donnelly's contribution to the health committee on 11 July when he expressed his views, especially on entry level nursing, which surprised me. I acknowledge he is trying to turn that around on behalf of his party. We and other groups have put forward an amendment to this motion and to Fianna's Fáil amendment to it in order to strengthen it. I will return to that point.

Nurses do not go on strike lightly. Hardly any of us do not have a family member who has been or is a nurse, and I am no different. This is not easy for them. Nursing is a very deep vocation. Nurses going on strike is the last resort. Withdrawing their labour shows the level of frustration among nurses.

I represent County Tipperary and on one side of the county we have University Hospital Limerick and on the other we have South Tipperary General Hospital, both of which have among the highest level of hospital overcrowding in Ireland. I meet nurses all the time. Their level of frustration extends beyond pay but pay is part of the issue. Their working conditions are intolerable and, in many cases, it is affecting their health. However, the issue is also about pay given that nurses are earning €7,000 less than similar healthcare professionals such as physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists and so on. Given the fact they have to spend four years to qualify, that is not acceptable.

The issue, in the main, is also about recruitment and retention, and the figures I outlined show that. The fact there is one application for every four nursing vacancies, which has been shown, demonstrates the issue we are trying to deal with tonight.

Nurses and midwives are the lowest paid graduates in the health service. This has to be dealt with quickly. I hear spin from the Government about nurses earning €57,000. I do not know if the Minister of State uses social media but many nurses put their pay slips up and they are not earning anything near €57,000. The way that figure is manufactured is not the right way of doing things. There is spin that it will cost €300 million and anyone doing basic maths will know that if one deducts agency pay of between €120 million and €140 million, the income tax contributed as a result, excessive, inflated recruitment costs, and the efficiencies and benefits of having more nurses and midwives, the figure is a fraction of what has been provided.

If one compares the pay and working conditions of nurses and midwives to our neighbour across the sea and to English-speaking countries, we have a serious problem and they are not being treated fairly. The topic of the year is Brexit but if it goes through in the shambles it is in now, there will be a pull from Britain as it looks for nurses, since it will not look to Europe, and our issues will be accentuated. Nurses working in English hospitals are promoted more quickly, they work 1.5 hours less on average a week and they are better paid.

Another issue that does not get enough attention is the health and safety of nurses and patients as a consequence of the fact that there is not enough nurses. I have seen the condition, health and well-being of nurses as a result of being overworked. I have close personal experience of it. It happens all over the country. I have met nurses. Members of my family are nurses. I have seen this, including the excessive hours and responsibility. We cannot continue to allow the impact on their mental health to happen. The safety of patients is at risk because of the time and effort they have to put in. Mistakes happen if they are working that hard, yet the nurses will bear responsibility and be brought to disciplinary proceedings. That is not fair because of the situation they have been left in, the vocation they have and their willingness to take of people.

I spent 11 months working on Sláintecare with other colleagues here. We have the national maternity plan, the mental health strategy and a range of requirements. I spent four hours debating the children's hospital at a committee meeting this morning. Nurses are needed to implement all those strategies, otherwise they will be a waste of time. If we do not value our single most important resource - nurses and midwives -to keep the blood flowing in the health system, these strategies will not be worth the paper they are written on.

There has been a lot of commentary about how this will have a knock-on pay impact. I understand the nervousness but it is clear from the pay deal negotiated that there is conditionality to deal with this. The issues raised by the nurses have not been dealt with to date, though there is conditionality in the pay agreement to deal with it. We are heading towards a strike because it has not been honoured. The statistics show that it has not been honoured. It must be honoured. The amendment that others and I have tabled is intended to create space for negotiations to happen within a fixed timeline to deal with the obvious retention, recruitment and pay issues.

Please take this on board because otherwise I categorically guarantee that we will be out on strike in 14 days. We will be dealing with this. The consequences for surgeries and the impact for the public will be dramatic and it will be ongoing. The public will support the nurses because it knows their working conditions.

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