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

I first want to note the absence of the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly. We cannot be in two places at the one time but it is a bit of an insult that he is not here this morning to make a statement on this matter.

I want to tell him and the Minister of State that this Government amendment is among the most outrageous and misleading efforts I have seen in years, and it also has enraged the students, who know the reality of their situation. Perhaps the most outrageous idea is that their unpaid work in our hospitals and on the front line is not as important now as it was in April and May. The reasoning is threadbare and flies in the face of the experience of nurses themselves. They are working to plug the gaps caused by the huge strains on our health service now, as they did in April and May. The difference is not that things are much easier now because of better staffing or lower infection levels. The only difference is that now the Government is not paying them anything.

At the start of November, the Government told us a review of the allowances for placements was taking place. This amendment takes the fact that the Government still has not improved the €50 a week as some kind of positive. The sum of €50 is all that is given to these workers. They may have to travel or to live hundreds of miles from home in temporary accommodation, often with huge costs in getting to and from their jobs. It is astonishing that more than 4,000 workers on the front line in the fight against Covid are in this situation. The misleading amendment from the Government gives the impression that its motivation is to safeguard the education of these students. That assertion and the rest of the amendment has enraged those nurses. If the Government thinks a vote here is the end of the issue, it is very much mistaken because this campaign will continue.

I noticed yesterday, as I looked back at the coverage of the strike last year by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, the abundance of photographs of smiling Fianna Fáil and Green Party candidates pledging their support to the nurses' cause. This betrayal of the next generation will not be forgotten or forgiven by these workers or their families.

Part of this neglect and the outright abuse is because nurses are overwhelmingly women. If we think back over the years to the various strikes and battles that nurses have had, it has always been the case that the fact this was overwhelmingly a female profession meant they had to constantly fight for equality and parity with similar professionals. The last strike in 2019 was centred around that demand for equality with other degree-based professionals. Their treatment then and in previous disputes with governments and the HSE was based on a belief in blatant discrimination and also on downplaying the importance in general of the role of care and the caring professions in our society. It is no accident that these professions are still overwhelmingly female.

Over the years, in the debates in the Dáil, the issue of the treatment of student nurses has arisen time and again. In 1998, 2000, 2011 and 2013, well before the pandemic, student nurses and their representatives had to fight for basic provisions. Mary Harney and a previous Fianna Fáil Government at one stage wanted to remove all payments from student nurses in placement. Others tried to reduce it and, like many other public sector workers, they faced demands for cuts during the austerity years. Time and again, the State has shown a history of contempt and disregard for nurses, student nurses and the caring profession in general. There is a theme in that, for all the platitudes in recent months, nothing has changed.

The most laughable claim in this amendment centres around improved staffing. The reality is that much of this so-called improved staffing is temporary staffing and the increased of use of agency staff. In the October figures, we discovered there are now almost 200 fewer permanent nurses in our health system than there were pre-pandemic. There were 41,572 permanent nursing and midwifery staff working in the HSE last December and this has now decreased to 41,370. There were just 2,289 temporary midwives and nurses working in the HSE in December last year and this had almost doubled to 4,026 by August of this year. We know it was through the Be on call for Ireland plan that many were recruited via agencies, such as CPL, with inferior contracts that exclude proper sick pay and proper access to other standards and conditions. The Government's promise to provide 1,146 additional acute hospital beds cannot run without proper, full-time, permanent staffing levels. The numbers quoted by the Minister of State are temporary and agency staff, and will not address the ongoing staffing crisis in our hospitals.

The Government's treatment of student nurses nearly guarantees a continued haemorrhage of skilled staff from this country in the future. They will leave with bitter memories of their treatment and go to other countries where nurses are given the respect and the pay they deserve. It is not the case that the issue of safe staffing has been resolved.

The reality on the wards is not what is in the Minister of State's amendment, which sounds as if the life of a student nurse is wonderful and that they are able to concentrate solely on their education. They and the INMO know the reality. The Minister of State can stick her head in the sand and pretend otherwise but that does not change reality.

Additionally, we know that the high rate of Covid-19 infections among nurses has continued with 353 healthcare workers contracting Covid-19 between 15 and 21 November alone. The reality of the Government's decision to reopen from level 5 is that when the next lockdown arises we will see even greater numbers of healthcare workers infected. This will place even greater demands on the student nurses the Government is treating with shocking contempt. Its policies on the reopening from level 5 has yet again guaranteed that another lockdown, surge in infections and crisis on our wards is central to paying the price for the failure to wrestle with the virus. Central to that will be the efforts of those student nurses. The Government’s amendment confirms that its treatment of them is, once again, one of contempt. By January, no doubt the Government will be lauding the efforts of our healthcare staff. We will probably clap them again. In dealing with the failure of this Government, its words will ring hollow following its amendment today.

Green Party Members are not here but I wish to speak to them. It has become standard for us over the past number of months to appeal to that party on the basis of it having stood in the election for the desire for change and having stood on the INMO pickets in the past year when it fought for equality and a decent treatment of workers. It professed to support the demands to pay student nurses in March and April, before it entered Government. I am appealing to that party again today. All that has changed from April until now is that that party is in government now. The lives and the needs of student nurses, the vital work they do, the need to pay the bills and rent and to live their lives, has not changed. The Green Party is in government now but if it cannot use that position to advocate for the workers as part of that Government, what is the point in being there? Is it just to get so-called green policies passed that exclude the people who are at the heart of them. If one cannot save the planet other than by abandoning group after group of vulnerable people in our society, there is no point in being in government.

I will finish with a quote from a motion put to a city council recently:

It’s only fair and right that our student nurses are properly recognised and recompensed for the service to our communities during this pandemic. Right across the city we have Covid patients being tended to by NHS staff and their student nurse colleagues. The Health Minister must recognise their efforts at the most challenging of times with fair and proper wages.

I agree with that, and I hope all in this House agree with it, but this is a Green Party motion put to Belfast City Council. Does the Green Party here agree with its colleagues in Belfast? If student nurses in Belfast deserve decent treatment and payment, then student nurses throughout this country deserve likewise.

The Minister of State made a very interesting Freudian slip when reading her speech. She spoke of the nurses being "fully surprised" that for certain periods of the training of each of them that they would get the payment. She meant to say "fully supervised" but fully surprised indeed they are.

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