Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It was hard work but a very interesting experience being on the committee. I thank everybody who made an appearance before us because we heard some really telling reports. There are many things we did not look at, least of all the schools because they had not returned and we did not have the experience of the return. Maybe there is a case to be said for looking at them in future.

For me, one of the most important things to come out of the committee was the public inquiry into what happened in the nursing homes. We should remind ourselves that, up to the time we issued the report, 985 residents had died having contracted Covid-19, but what is interesting about that figure is that it is 56% of all the deaths in the State. That is totally disproportionate because that group comprises 0.65% of the population. That says something to us. It was a trend around the world that older people were more vulnerable, the virus sought the vulnerability in people, and it exposed all the weaknesses in our public services. It certainly exposed, I believe, the weaknesses in our care of the elderly. Much of our time was taken up in looking at that, but the recommendation for a public inquiry to be established has to be taken very seriously by the Department of Health and any preparation to begin that needs to be undertaken without delay.

The second part of that and linked to it is the privatized nature of the care of the elderly in this country. We changed within ten to 12 years from having 80% of elderly care services in public control and 20% in private control to the precise opposite. That was a shocking move but it was accelerated and encouraged by tax incentives and the idea that there was profit to be made - and all these homes in the private sector were for profit - out of the industry looking after the grey sector of our population. That is pretty disgusting and I think they deserve better.

The worrying thing is that there are many parts of this country where there are planning applications currently in process and they are not just for individuals like Mr. and Ms Smith or Murphy down the road to open homes, but for multinational corporations to invest in the care of the elderly. Companies like Bartra Capital Property have planning applications in for hundreds of beds in premises that they want to use for care of the elderly, not because they love them but because there is a great deal of money to be made out of it. One of the recommendations in the report is that we should look into moving into a publicly funded model in the community and, if we are serious about it, then that is what we should mean and planning applications like that should not be granted. They should be halted because that is not the future for the care of the elderly.

As I said, the systemic weaknesses in the provision of all our public services were highlighted: childcare, schooling, transport. All of these systemic weaknesses had been in the system for years but it took a pandemic to highlight them. That is part of what we are seeing here, particularly when it comes to workers' rights. We did a lot of work around the professions in the care of the elderly and in the hospitals, including nurses, care workers, cleaners and so on, but also in the meat plants. It has been revealed that 80% of workers in nursing homes who were engaged by agencies have absolutely no access to sick care provision or sick care leave. We had people forcing themselves to go into work because they had no sick pay to rely on, knowing that they were either symptomatic or not feeling well or that infection was in the workplace, when they should be isolating. Many of them, because of the low-pay regime and the lack of provision for workers' rights, were living in overcrowded, congregated settings where they were sharing homes with many people. This is especially true of the meat plant industry, and one of the recommendations we have made here is a study of that industry to see at what level it operates, how it exploits workers and the need to implement a mandatory sick pay scheme.

People have complemented Deputy Varadkar for putting out to public consultation how we do a sick pay scheme. I do not think that is good enough. We need to have a mandatory sick pay scheme for companies who are making vast profits and agencies who engage nurses and care workers and are making vast profits, and we need to do it sooner rather than later, as we are facing into a further spike in this pandemic. For that reason, I will bring a Bill to the House in the next week or two which will be all about mandatory sick pay schemes being forced on meat plants and those who use agency workers, particularly migrant agency workers who have no provision to access a sick pay scheme or cannot move employer.

Healthcare workers have borne a huge burden and thousands of them are positive and are endangering their families because they have to go in and out to work in an environment where Covid is rampant. A court order was given today in County Kerry to close down a nursing down in Listowel, so shocking was the report from HIQA of the carry-on in that nursing home. I hope that is not typical but it happens. Care workers have to work in these settings and they are not being protected. When the nursing homes sector complains about HSE poaching, this is unfair to workers. Workers should have a right to move to better conditions and better pay, and that is what is going on. They are moving into the employment of the HSE because it is better, with guaranteed pay rates and sick pay.

I will say a word on tracking and tracing. It is totally inadequate. We have seen the employment of trackers in recent weeks where they were offered zero-hour contracts and have no sick pay. The laboratory scientists are taking ballots for strike action because they have industrial relations issues outstanding. They have to be dealt with. We cannot afford to have any of our trackers or tracers dealt with except with absolute respect, given such conditions that we can recruit and retain them and move to a strategy described by somebody as being like a fire brigade: where there is an outbreak, they move in, track the virus and they crush it. If we think fires are a danger, we should surely think this virus is a danger and be in a position to use the restriction period to invest in those much-needed areas and to move quickly to crush the virus wherever it rears its ugly head. It is happening now in nursing homes.

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