Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I welcome and support the motion. We all remember when, just before Christmas, the Government voted against paying student nurses and the wave of disappointment and anger that rolled across the country the days after the vote. Young student nurses, some with their faces still bearing the marks of the face masks they wore on 12-hour shifts, looked at their TV screens as Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Green Party votes, one after another, torpedoed their chance of getting paid.

Numbered among those who voted against student nurses getting paid was the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Harris, who back in March had issued a press statement saying they would get paid. It is one thing not to pay student nurses and to make them work on the front line without pay in extremely hazardous conditions in daily fear of their health and that of their parents and grandparents at home, but it is another cruelty entirely to promise to pay them and then to come into this Chamber and vote against it, just as the Minister, Deputy Harris, did before Christmas.

For any student nurses or midwives watching this debate, I will outline exactly why they have not been paid yet. There are 72 of us in this Chamber who want to pay them but there are 77 Members of this House, namely, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Green Deputies, who do not want to pay them. They should learn the names of these 77 Deputies and repay their arrogance and greed at the ballot box in the next election.

We in Aontú have been speaking to many students on the front lines and it has been incredibly moving to witness the selflessness of their work. They will not strike, simply because they do not want that to result in their patients suffering or dying. When they phone me, they spend the majority of the phone call expressing concern for their patients. They tell me of the wards on which they are working and of the heartache of seeing patients take a bad turn. They tell me of ringing the bell looking for senior staff to help them and coming to the realisation that there are very few senior staff on that ward to do so. When student nurses and midwives get talking to a Deputy on the phone, the priority of their conversation is the welfare of the vulnerable. It is only at the very end of the conversation that they turn to the economic circumstances they are in. These are ordinary men and women - mostly women - around the country who are doing extraordinary things for us.

When Deputy Harris was Minister for Health, he wasted billions of euro in overspend on the black hole that is called the national children's hospital. Many other Ministers wasted billions in overspend on broadband, and millions were spent on the Dáil printer and on faulty PPE that is now deemed unusable. We should compare and contrast this issue with the Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Green Party proposal to increase the salary of the Department of Health's Secretary General by €81,000. That is not €81,000 as a full salary but as an increase on top of a salary of about €210,000. That means there is an income inequality in this situation of 55:1. The new Secretary General will earn 55 times the income of student nurses and student staff on the front lines of our hospitals in the most critical health crisis this country has ever witnessed. Annually, the Minister for Health earns 34 times the income of a student nurse working on the front line. Many people watching this debate will feel that ratio should be reversed if fairness was in place. If the Minister realised or experienced for one minute what student nurses are enduring mentally, physically and psychologically on a daily basis, he would not be putting forward the amendment he is bringing before this House today. That amendment has the objective of destroying the opportunity of paying student nurses and student midwives a proper wage. I ask the Minister, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party to cut out the cheap words and the patronising hand-clapping and actually to pay student nurses and student midwives what they are entitled to, which they are earning every day in the service of the people of this country.

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