Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

In the past 48 hours the Taoiseach has stated that 25,000 medical appointments have been cancelled due to the nurses' strike yesterday. In some cases, those individuals would have waited months or years for those appointments. Next week, if the strike goes ahead, we will see another 25,000 cancellations. The knock-on effect will be delays across the entire health system, just as are experiencing the worst weather we have had this year. It will take months to recover those lost times, which will result in prolonged suffering and increased anxiety for thousands of people. It is not as if we do not already have serious delays in the health system.

As the Tánaiste knows, in previous Governments I negotiated two public sector pay agreements. I know all too well the constraints in terms of public spending and ensuring that agreements are adhered to by unions and workers, but by the same token, every single public sector agreement, certainly the ones that I was involved in, always had to deal with anomalies and inequalities that were presented at the time through side deals and special arrangements. That has always been a feature of the agreements. Specific issues have been raised by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, such as in relation to the acknowledged fact of the difficulty in retention and recruitment. Nurses have expressed legitimate concerns. As others have said, this is only the second strike by nurses in 100 years.

It is quite clear that this is not something they resort to lightly. No nurse, as was evident on every picket line at every hospital yesterday, wants to be on strike. Nursing is a vocation and our nurses are among the best in the world. They want to be back at work but they need to know that their profession will be respected and secure in the future.

The Taoiseach said in this House that all disputes end in a settlement. He is right, but that only happens when both parties are fully engaged in an effort to find a solution that will address the real and genuine grievances set out while sustaining the public finances. It is now incumbent on him and the Government to instruct public officials to engage with the INMO to work through these issues and find a mutually acceptable settlement. The Government cannot stand on the sideline and expect a settlement to be arrived at without its direct intervention. The Labour Court did not intervene yesterday because it judged the parties to be too far apart. It is up to the Tánaiste and the Government to reach out to nurses and find a solution. Will he, therefore, assure patients who are worried about next week's appointments that the Government will make an intervention to resolve this dispute before the strike takes place? That will clearly require flexibility and imagination; all settlements do. Both of those are in short supply in the Government's approach to this issue to date.

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