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

No thanks. You were, Paul. I saw you.

Simon himself is now at the other end of the agenda and is probably one of the figures of disdain and disgust among the wonderful movement. There was a feeling of the Repeal the 8th movement on the march.

The march largely comprised young people. It was hugely feminine and it was international. It felt like the movement we had been through on the campaign to repeal the eighth amendment but nobody was carrying "I fancy Simon" signs.

I want to describe what goes on with the Government. This Government poses as liberal. The members of the Government have a liberal attitude in wanting to promote the just causes of same-sex marriage, the repeal of the eighth amendment, reproductive rights and same-sex family rights. However, when it comes to the neoliberal agenda, the Government is as vicious as Margaret Thatcher or any of the rest of them. The Government has set out to try to break the nurses because it wants to teach a lesson to all public sector workers.

I want to preface everything I say by saying it is for the nurses to decide if this recommendation is good enough for them. The issue here is for us to be able to state clearly that the public sector pay deal is not fit for purpose and blind adherence to it will guarantee that the core issues therein remain ignored. This will increasingly become a fact as we go through the next couple of years. It is not just for the workers concerned. It is not fit for purpose in terms of our public services and what we can expect to be provided from them.

The view has been put across by many commentators that it is an outrage that nurses would get anything outside of that pay deal and that it will bring ruination to the country if we pay them more than the miserly award in the deal. The rubbish and hypocrisy that comes from the usual suspects never ceases to amaze me. They go to great lengths to commission reports, the conclusions of which tell us that there is no case for giving the nurses a decent pay rise beyond the constraints of the public sector pay deal. They claim there are no outstanding issues and, a decade after the sacrifices that nurses and others made, there is no crisis in the hospitals. I suspect those shrill commentators and, indeed, many of the politicians on the other side of the House do not actually experience the pain, overcrowding and the seriousness of what the health service is grinding beneath and what those nurses work under. Most of those commentators and politicians have private health insurance which guards one from the chronic problems that nurses are trying to highlight.

The key question is not whether the nurses want to accept this recommendation. I do not believe it is good enough but it is up to them. The key question for politicians is whether this recommendation and the measures contained in it will deal with the chronic shortage of nurses and midwives in our hospitals. Will it recruit and retain nurses? We can say conclusively that it will not. If it does not keep nurses here, and we will see the proof in the pudding over the next period of time, then we really have to think about what sort of a Government we want.

The Minister and his cheerleaders say there is no crisis in the system and people are not endangered. I learned a lot listening to Ms Phil Ní Sheaghdha over the course of the strike. One thing she pointed out well, eloquently and scientifically was that we work under a seriously dangerous ratio of nurses to patients. The recommended international best standard is one nurse to every four patients. I would not hold California up as an exemplary social democracy but it has a law that states the ratio of nurses to patients should never fall below one nurse to every five patients. Our system has one nurse to every eight patients, at best, and one nurse to every 11 patients, at worst. The latter end of that scale tends to apply in the psychiatric services.

The Taoiseach, a former Minister for Health, and the current Minister for Health manage a system that oversaw the trolley crisis grow last year to 108,000-plus people on trolleys, in which nursing numbers fell by 6% last year which means there are 1,754 fewer staff nurses in Ireland today than a decade ago and where, in the psychiatric services in the past 13 years since A Vision for Change was born, 70% of all beds have been taken out with the promise that the shortfall would be replaced within the community but only 36% of what was lost of that service was replaced within the community. We now have a system which is in chronic crisis with very dangerous nurse-patient ratios. It seems that it is okay to endanger patients and, apparently, to overrun the national children's hospital by €500 million and to have a procurement process for CervicalCheck that results in the fiasco that we have witnessed. It is okay for all that to happen but God forbid that the Government interferes in a public sector pay deal that is not working for the public sector, the workers or the people in this country who rely on those services. It is ironic that the Government is prepared to stick with that pay deal and undermine our ability to recruit and retain the staff we need. The result is, for example, the shortage of beds in places such as Linn Dara in Cherry Orchard where, most of the year, half the beds are empty and those are beds for adolescent children with psychiatric problems.

We are happier to pay €100 million a year to agency nurses to bridge the gap in staffing than to deal with the issues. Beyond the health service, we are happy to pay almost €1 billion a year to keep people in homeless accommodation through a combination of supporting rack-renting landlords, hotels and bed and breakfasts. It never gets mentioned that we are wasting €1 billion a year in the homeless industry.

It will be a matter for the nurses and the shop stewards. We will know, in the next while, whether they accept this recommendation, but if it is not good enough for them, it should not be good enough for us. They will have our full and continued support whatever they decide both publicly and in our communities. There may be a howl of outrage from the usual suspects I mentioned earlier if the nurses reject the deal. They may see it as more guff and nonsense from some union leaders who should know better. The public, the ordinary people who receive the services from the nurses, know and understand that a bad deal for the nurses is a bad deal for all of us because it does not contribute one iota to improving the health service.

This motion also attempts to address another element of the crisis. I am shocked at how the Government is behaving with the Psychiatric Nurses Association and its paramedics and ambulance drivers. Deputy Paul Murphy and I raised this as a Topical Issue matter a little over a week ago and the Minister of State's colleague, Deputy Finian McGrath, in his printed statement, said that they concluded that the Government will not recognise the National Ambulance Service Representative Association, NASRA, union. Get out from behind the HSE. It is not only the HSE that is denying the ambulance drivers the opportunity to be in the union of their choice. The Cabinet and the Government are also sticking by that decision. It is most undemocratic, anti-constitutional and unbelievably right wing that the Government has taken that position and forced 500 paramedics and ambulance drivers back onto the streets tomorrow and beyond. It has been said that there are multiple unions representing paramedics and ambulance drivers, most of which do not have a membership of 500, which NASRA has. It deserves recognition. Shame on the Government if it holds out on refusing to give it to them because it is forcing another, deeper crisis on the health service.

I pay tribute to the almost 40,000 nurses for the battle they have fought in the past couple of weeks. It was summed up best by one nurse who spoke on "Morning Ireland" and said that this was their Rosa Parks moment and they were not going to get off the bus. They may settle for this or they may not but, whatever they do, the fight for parity and equality within nursing in this country is not over by a long shot.

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