Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I put it to the Minister that this is the most challenging week in the history of Ireland's health service. There are 2,000 Covid patients in our hospitals with 200 Covid patients in our intensive care units. There were 93 deaths yesterday. Last weekend there was the death of a nurse in a Kilkenny nursing home. With all of this going on, the Minister has decided that fourth year students, who are mostly female and young, should risk their lives and health to go into wards in hospitals that are raging with Covid-19 and that they should be paid less than €10 per hour and less than the minimum wage. I do not carefully watch the psychology or personality of Government Members, but insofar as I have a sense of the way the Minister for Health projects himself, I often get the impression that he is a chap who is sometimes rather pleased with himself. I hope the Minister is pleased with this decision. Young workers, who are in the main women, are getting less than €10 per hour in hospitals that are ravaged with Covid. What a scandal that is.

Oscar Wilde's character, Lord Darlington, once defined a cynic as someone who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. If we take the Wildean definition of a cynic, then the Minister has made a very cynical decision. It should be reversed and it is not too late to be reversed. The student nurses have been paid the healthcare assistant rate before and the Minister should do it again. He knows it is the right thing to do.

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