Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is important to put on the record of the House once again that we have a pay deal already not just with nurses and midwives but with all public servants, and that pay deal runs until 2020. It provides for pay increases of approximately 7% over that period, full pay restoration for anyone earning under €80,000, increments,and special increases for the low paid and those recruited after 2012. That comes at a considerable cost - a cost of approximately €400 million this year alone.

I do not know where we will be as a country in ten or 12 weeks' time. If we end up in a scenario whereby we have a hard Brexit with no deal, that will change things. The Minister for Finance will produce figures later on what the Department of Finance's estimates are on how a no-deal Brexit could impact on our economy. They are similar to the figures produced by the Central Bank last week and they are less optimistic than those produced by the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI and Copenhagen Economics earlier. They indicate that our economy will slow down. It will not go back into recession and it will not be like the financial crisis ten years ago, but our economy will slow down, and while employment will continue to grow, unemployment will rise as well. In ten or 12 weeks, we could find ourselves needing to find a lot of money to save people's jobs because there are people working in the food industry, agriculture, small and medium enterprises, SMEs, and small exporters whose jobs may be under threat in a few weeks. I have to be Taoiseach for the whole country and I have to bear in mind that in a few weeks or a few months, we could be talking about job losses in certain sectors of the economy and not pay rises, and it would be irresponsible of me not to admit that to this House and not to put it into this debate for discussion.

On intervention and engagement, we have a mechanism by which we resolve disputes such as this and we have State bodies that engage in dispute resolution. They are the WRC and the Labour Court, and the Government is part of those conversations. Disputes are always resolved in the end and this dispute will be resolved in the end, but there are parameters under which it can be resolved. It has to be affordable for the taxpayer, it has to be fair to all other public servants, including other people working in the health sector, and it has to be fair to patients.

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