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

The facts on the ground speak for themselves. To allude to our earlier discussion, they suggest that there are too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Too much of the money is going to the chiefs and not enough is going to pay the people who deliver the front-line services. Our ICU situation, for example, is terrifying. It is not about beds because we have the beds and ventilators. We do not have the staff because we have not recruited them or created the posts. We are not creating the posts in nursing and we are not aiming to recruit enough teachers to reduce our class sizes to the level of those in Denmark, as opposed to having three times the ratio in Denmark. We are desperately lacking outdoor workers in local authorities to do maintenance work, work in communities, fix the roads and do all of that kind of stuff. There is a clear and obvious shortage of front-line public sector workers in the area of key service delivery and we need to respond to that.

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