Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the motion. As everyone knows, nursing is not a job, it is a vocation. Nurses' dedication, the hours they put in and the way they look after people day in and day out is a credit to them. Nurses on the front line have endured horrific working conditions in recent years and they have kept going, kept working and kept airing their views as to the conditions in which they were operating. Obviously, however, no one has been listening. We must give student nurses something to ensure we keep them in the system. What is happening at present? Many young people are finishing school, they pursue their nursing degrees and then they get the hell out of the country. That should not be the case in any society. We should have something to tempt those in the nursing profession in order to keep them here.

I have always stated that if one decides that one is going to spend five, six or ten years in this country, the first thing that should happen is that one's college fees should be paid. The second thing is that people need to be given a wage. The position with apprentices is similar. One cannot just leave them with only money coming from home while they try to work jobs in order to remain in college. The third point is that because of the housing crisis in the various cities - it should be borne in mind that many of the big hospitals are in the larger cities - the wages nurses receive, be they student nurses or people who have been in the profession for a good while, are insufficient to allow them to afford the cost of rent . The Government could have something to say if it had tried, for example, to sort out matters on the housing side. What has been done about affordable housing for young gardaí and nurses or other front-line staff? The answer is nothing. In Dublin - or Galway, Limerick or Cork - can they afford a house with the wages they are on? The reality is that they cannot. There are inept people in the likes of the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government who have not moved on. It is a pretty simple job to build houses by the square foot if the State provides the land.

The Government must sit down with these nurses. We must sort this out. We cannot keep going down a road of unhappy workers because if we have unhappy workers, we have an unhappy environment that will not survive. The Government therefore needs to address this once and for all.

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