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

The devil is always in the detail with budgets. Despite the headline-grabbing figures for this budget, digging into the detail reveals some very severe problems. I was absolutely gobsmacked to get an email yesterday from a young woman who is a science graduate pursuing a postgraduate qualification in public health. She applied for a job as a contact tracer and received a contract from CPL, an agency. It was a zero-hours contract with no sick pay that could be terminated at any point. The hours offered were not guaranteed even on a weekly basis.

People need to understand how shocking that is. Whatever view one has about the current situation and the strategies relating to Covid-19 that are to be pursued, we simply cannot get back to anything like normality without having a professional, well-resourced and well-staffed contact tracing regime. That is key to moving beyond lockdowns. In spite of that, this is how science graduates and those studying public health are being treated. They are being offered hire them and fire them zero-hour contracts with no sick pay and at pathetic salary levels. It is a shocking disgrace. Needless to say, the graduate to whom I referred, and many of her fellow graduates, are unlikely to take those jobs. Who would work under those conditions? Instead, the graduates are looking at other employment possibilities.

This is not just absolutely shameful treatment of people whom we desperately need in order to combat Covid-19, it is also subverting the public health effort. It is risking lives and public health to try to fight Covid-19 on the back of cheap labour with rotten conditions for the workers who are operating on the front line. It is shameful and beggars belief.

Of course, it is not the first time we have seen such a situation. Several months ago, I revealed on foot of a nurse contacting me that CPL, the company that is offering these zero-hour contracts to contact tracers, was offering rotten contracts to nurses and other healthcare workers who offered in the Be on Call for Ireland initiative. Those workers bravely volunteered to fight Covid-19 only to discover they were being offered hire them and fire them contracts. The nurse who contacted me contracted Covid-19 after being employed via CPL. She was not given sick pay. That is how the contact tracers whom we need desperately need will be treated. God knows how the testing people are being treated. More generally, the penny-pinching approach to recruitment to all areas of the Covid-19 response threatens to completely derail and undermine the response we need to deal with the pandemic. It is an absolute shocker.

The contract states that there is no obligation on the company to provide the worker with work and there is no obligation on the worker to accept the work offered. It states that the company gives no guarantee that hours will be offered to the worker on weekly basis. Who on earth would take a job like that? Is that how we wish for people to be treated? It is unbelievable that people being recruited for possibly the most important job in terms of dealing with Covid-19 are being offered hire them and fire them contracts. I wish to thank Ferghal Blaney andThe Mirror. It contacted the HSE to confirm these facts and is putting the story out as I speak. It was shocked that this could be true, but the HSE confirmed all the facts.

This situation is absolutely disgraceful. Is it any wonder that the State has failed consistently to ramp up the health service or the number of nurses, doctors and public health teams we desperately need to recruit when it is treating healthcare workers in that manner? The pay apartheid system whereby those recruited after 2012 are seen as being worth less than those recruited previously is undermining the State's ability to recruit healthcare workers we desperately need to man ICU and acute beds and to staff the contact tracing regime.

On other aspects of the health response, I was shocked to read the small print of the health budget. One would think additional money would be put into health research in the health budget when we desperately need scientific research in the area of developing vaccines and therapies, but not a single extra cent was put into health-related research. That is shocking. The overall budget for Covid-19 response in 2021 it is €8 billion less than that in 2020. In other words, the Government is gambling, without evidence or basis, that it will be able to get away with spending less in 2021 to combat Covid-19 in spite of the fact that the rate of infection is going through the roof. It is clear the Government has no strategy to deal with Covid-19. If it were to have such a strategy, that would critically depend on contact tracing and testing, but this is how the Government is going about that aspect.

The Ministers who were present earlier have left the Chamber. I refer to the lack of supports for taxi drivers and arts workers. Why on earth would the Government put a cap of €120 on the income people can earn over and above the PUP? That will affect people who have run up costs over the past year and have had no income. Now the Government is putting a cap on the amount they can earn over and above the income support, which means there is a disincentive to work. A taxi driver asked me what he is meant to do when he gets to €120. He wondered whether he should tell the customer to get out of the car. It is madness. We need real supports and grants to cover the ongoing costs of those groups, but that has not been delivered in the budget, which is typical of a budget that short-changed the Covid-19 response and the workers whose livelihoods have been hit hardest by the pandemic.

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