Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

On the question of consultants, how long is the Minister going to stand by and watch the haemorrhaging of consultants from the Irish health service? The situation is now at crisis point. There are over 500 vacant consultant posts. Many aspects of the health service are crumbling and in crisis as a result of this. People are dying as a result and are experiencing and enduring life threatening conditions. There are reasons why this is happening. The reasons have been set out by various reviews and surveys that have been done about hospital doctors. There are issues in relation to bullying, for example, inhumane working hours, awful working conditions for many people, no payment of overtime - a whole range of issues. One needs to look at career structure and the over-concentration on specialisation with hospital consultants. We should be training many more generalists, as they do in other countries.

There have been long promises to tackle this issue. The cuts that took place in 2012 and the creation of the two-tier system has been devastating.

The then Minister, Deputy Varadkar, promised in 2014 that he was going to reverse this. The Public Sector Pay Commission has said that it has to be reversed. When is he going to take action to end the two-tier pay system among hospital consultants, which is doing so much damage?

See this speech in context