Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I note that health ministers met as part of the British-Irish Council. I would be interested to know whether they were aware of the alarming similarities in the crises in the health services in the North, South and Britain. Today, health workers in the North are on strike. On 18 December, nurses will come out on strike. They are on work to rule today. Other health workers are already on strike because of a shocking inequality between health workers in the NHS in the North and those in Britain. Health workers in the North get paid less - they have caps on their pay - than their equivalents in Britain. This shocking inequality was initially supported by DUP health ministers in the Assembly and maintained by Ms Michelle O'Neill of Sinn Féin when she was health minister in 2017. Just as People Before Profit said to nurses when they went out on strike for decent pay and conditions in the South, we fully support health workers in the North fighting for pay parity. What is at stake is the quality of health services in the North, which are suffering exactly the same problems as ours are, namely, massively high waiting lists, huge overcrowding and terrible conditions for health workers. As a result, they cannot recruit enough health workers and others are leaving to work for agencies or leaving the country altogether. That sounds familiar, does it not? In the worst way, there are similarities between the North, South and Britain in terms of the mistreatment of and underinvestment in our health services. We should all support the nurses and other health workers in the North who are taking industrial action to remedy that inequality.

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