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

I did not get an answer to my previous question about vulture funds being allowed to evict people. I would appreciate an answer on that because it is happening in the teeth of Christmas.

On public sector reform, the Government has thrown a considerable amount of mud into people's eyes in response to the demands of the student nurses and midwives to be paid for their work on placement, to be respected for the role they played during the Covid pandemic and not to be financially punished with the shocking fees they must pay, meaning they are actually paying for the privilege of being exploited.

The Taoiseach's explanations to date have not responded to this point. The majority of the student nurses and midwives are saying they will leave when they finish their training because they have been treated so badly in their four years and because they are facing into an understaffed and under-resourced health service. The two things are directly connected. They regard their exploitation and non-payment as students as a precursor of what they will face afterwards and, of course, that is the truth. That is why the nurses went out on strike last year. Our health service is in a perilous state and our healthcare workers' morale is on the floor.

That is why the Government should stop repeating this nonsense that it will somehow compromise their education to remunerate them during their training. It should remove the burden of fees from them. It would actually allow us to recruit and retain these student nurses and stop them flooding out of the country when we desperately need them to stay and work in our health service.

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