Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Céad míle fáilte roimh gach duine atá anseo. I welcome the nurses, students and their union representatives. I am delighted to see them in the Gallery. I regret that the Minister, Deputy Harris, has left, but it is even more regrettable that the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, is not here. There is no explanation for that. He should be here. He has to answer for why he is not paying these people. The Minister, Deputy Harris, asked the Opposition a question before he left. He said that in our amendments, we suggest that we pay nurses. He asked us to explain, if an exception is made for one group, how it is explained to all other groups in the public sector. I will offer an explanation which is that this group rejected that deal by a margin of 94%. That says something about how it feels about jobs, pay and conditions. This group is a major part of the solution to our health crisis and if we do not deal with that, we will let sick people, future generations and all workers in the health service down. They are a key part of the solution.

The Government seems to reject, with the Public Service Pay Commission, that their pay is related at all. The Minister, Deputy Regina Doherty, repeatedly said on "The Week in Politics" that they are not looking for more money. He should get into the real world and listen to what these workers are saying. The commission findings, according to the Minister, Deputy Harris, stated that recruitment and retention issues were a cause of concern but it could not find them to be a determining factor, and that it involves many aspects. It has many aspects and I hope the Minister of State has read the submissions from the PNA and INMO. They are wonderful, clear submissions. They are not rocket science and if the Minister of State has not read them, he should. Some of the figures which have been read out and quoted by other Deputies include a €7,000 annual pay gap between nurses and other graduate professions in the health service. The starting salary of three nurses equals my salary. Every Deputy is paid a salary which is three times what a nurse is paid. The Taoiseach is paid a salary which is six times what a nurse is paid. We should think of those facts when we determine the future and daily lives of other people in this legislation.

I will focus on an aspect of the submission from the union which shows something interesting about the role the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has played. Allied with certain parts of the media, it has tried to muddy the issues and encourages us to think that this is a dispute about the numbers of nurses we have compared to other countries, that there is no issue and no confusion, that we are not short of nurses and that the higher turnover of nurses in our public services relates to something else. Some even go as far as to call them irresponsible because of Brexit. It is out of their control and is nothing to do with them. How dare anyone accuse the nurses of being irresponsible and say that now is not the right time because of Brexit? Now might be the right time to pay them properly.

The Taoiseach, the Minister who has just left and others have presided over a system in our health service that is creaking and not working. That means they have presided over a two-tier health service, encouraging private health at the expense of public health. In the submission I refer to, the unions point out that the joint employers' submission which tries to state there is no difficulty with retention takes out chunks of the HSE submission. The HSE submits that the economic downturn has had a profound impact on the nursing and midwifery resource with substantial reductions of between 4,500 and 5,000 nurses and midwives, which is a historical fact that has to be addressed. These chunks of the HSE submission were ignored by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. It says that the overall picture of nursing and midwifery is one of constant challenge to effectively retain and recruit. Its conclusion is that the pay of nurses must be examined. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform ignored that and instead did a public service pay deal that did not look at the details of what its own organisation, the HSE, not just the unions, was saying.

We have been asked to provide solutions and to state why we should pay the nurses and not those in other sectors. We have also been asked repeatedly by the media and Ministers from where we will get the money. The nursing unions have offered some very good solutions in terms of what would be saved by not having to retain agency nurses on a weekly basis and what the Exchequer would save by getting PRSI and tax money back from increased salaries. There are other choices the Government could make. The choices it has made have been detrimental to this country. One such choice was not to take the Apple tax money and to keep it in an escrow account. There are billions there that could be used to pay nurses. One does not have to look far for solutions or to see that the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is mismanaging the facts in order to undermine this group of workers. I am 100% for the nurses.

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