Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The amendment is narrowly phrased. It states that for nurses or midwives living in the Republic who have trained and qualified in the UK alone there would be automatic recognition. Please God, we will be through this surge in a small number of months but the need is pressing.

I will not press the amendment. I will not push it to a vote, because it is technical and I do not want to jeopardise the rest of the Bill with it, but what the Minister is being told and what he states here in good faith jars with the experience of those nurses and midwives who are trying to sign up. If nurses and midwives living here have trained and work in the UK, it is not enough if it only takes three weeks to get them signed up. We need them signed up right now. We need them in our hospitals right now. We need probably for them to have specialist training in all sorts of areas related to this virus. I ask the Minister to undertake to figure out how we can reduce it to a small number of days, not weeks, such that if we have NHS trained nurses and midwives living here, we can get them into our hospitals where we need them in a matter of days.

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