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

We should not set the need to recruit health workers to increase the capacity of the health service against the need to stimulate other parts of the economy. Recruiting health workers should be part of the stimulus for two reasons. First, if our health service is overwhelmed, then we can forget everything else. The stimulus will mean nothing if we have to lock down our economy again. A precondition, therefore, for the reopening of the economy is to get the public health service up to capacity levels that will allow us to continue to function economically. The two go hand in hand.

Second, paying health workers properly and recruiting more of them will in itself be a stimulus to the economy and to every part of the country that has health service facilities or hospitals. In Dún Laoghaire, St. Michael's Hospital holds the local economy together. I am sure that is true for Tallaght and many other parts of the country where there are hospitals, so the two are not set against one another; they are intimately connected. It is very important that the Government recognises that in the July stimulus from both an economic point of view and from the imperative of getting our health service up to the capacity levels we need to be able to function alongside Covid-19.

See this speech in context