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

To follow up on that, the Minister said earlier on this that it was education not work so we should not pay them. We should be clear that this departs from what the Government was forced to do in March and April when it had to acknowledge they were actually working and pay them at the healthcare assistant level.

The idea that the student nurses who are on placement at this time are not working is a nonsense, when there are 500 to 600 healthcare workers out for more than 14 weeks with long-tail Covid, of whom the biggest cohort comprises nurses and midwives. Nurses and HCAs make up the largest cohort of workers being hit with Covid infection and they are working in a highly dangerous environment from an infection point of view. There is no question that the student nurses are working. In fact, they are being exploited and our hospitals would not be operating without them. The idea that they are exclusively on some sort of educational placement is not accurate. Their placements are part of their education but they are working. Indeed, they are being exploited because they are not being paid as they were earlier this year.

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