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

I raised this issue with the Taoiseach on 20 October. It might be of interest to the Minister to know that the video of that engagement has been watched 250,000 times, which is very rare for any video of proceedings in this House in which I am involved. That was the scale of the response from student nurses. In that engagement, the Taoiseach said the following:

...I will engage with the HSE and the Minister for Health on student nurses working on the wards in the current context. As they were earlier, they should be paid in accordance with the agreement arrived at earlier in the year. I will follow up on that.

When we put the points to him regarding the situation of the student nurses, he agreed that they should be paid at the previous rate. For the reasons Deputy Gino Kenny outlined, they cannot get other jobs. There is no question that they are working, in a context where they are replacing the hundreds of nurses who are down with Covid. That is why they are working. The Minister can call what they are doing an educational placement - it is, in a certain sense, education - but he cannot deny that they are also working. They cannot engage in any other work and they must be paid, not exploited, for the work they are doing.

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