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

People Before Profit is extremely proud to present this motion in support of medical laboratory scientists. I commend them for taking the action they did not want to take, but felt compelled to take, in order to force the Government to listen to them and engage with them. The only reason we are here debating this is not because of People Before Profit or anybody else, it is because the medical laboratory scientists made the decision to strike after trying every other avenue available to them. They engaged with the WRC, the HSE and others. After waiting for 20 years and being reasonable, they were finally forced to take industrial action. It took that for the media, the Government and politics to listen to them. That is why we are here. If anything positive comes out of the new round of engagement, it will be because of their action.

People need to understand just how important the medical laboratory scientists are to the health of people in this country. It is not just a cliché about being the hidden heroes. It is absolutely critical, as medical science and technology advances - it is advancing all the time - and as the role of testing and the analysis of tests are ever-more important to the accurate diagnosis and treatment of illness. We do not have enough medical laboratory scientists, given that 20% of posts are not filled, or worse in many laboratories. When I was at St. Vincent's Hospital the other day I spoke to people in the various laboratories and in some of them the staffing rate was as low as 50%. That results in an unsafe situation, because people have to work excessive hours to cover for those who are not there. Their workload is increasing all the time, as is the importance of the work they are doing, but it is the same number of people doing it and the posts are not adequately filled. That puts the health and safety of patients - the public - in danger through no fault at all of the medical laboratory scientists, but through the fault of the Government, the HSE and the Department of Health who think because they are hidden nobody really notices what is going on. In a sense, the Government and the HSE have taken advantage of the fact that they are among the hidden heroes. We had all the clapping during Covid but, in reality, these people, who are critical to the functioning and quality of the health service and therefore to the health of people who need that service, were taken for granted.

The medical laboratory scientists have again gone into discussions, but when we look at the Government's amendment, which I strongly recommend the medical laboratory scientists do, frankly it is an insult to the medical laboratory scientists because there is lots of praise but then it states: "there was extensive engagement between health management and the MLSA on the use of the sectoral bargaining fund in the last number of months, however, there are insufficient funds to fully or partially resolve this matter to the satisfaction of the MLSA". That is just not true that there are insufficient funds, but that is what it is about, namely, penny-pinching on the part of the Department of Health and most importantly on the part of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, which has been asked repeatedly to engage in this process. Quite honestly, the Taoiseach and Government representatives, in responding to the questions about this dispute, did not own up to their own responsibility in all of this. Some of us were raising this issue before the strike and appealing to the Government to prevent the strike from having to go ahead by listening to, engaging with and responding to the legitimate demands dating back 20 years, where the pay parity sought had already been recommended and the Government just did not listen. It did not engage. The Government did not own up to its own responsibility in all of this, but somehow claims that the very small amount of money that is involved in reality is unavailable when it was just not willing to go there. That is why we are here.

It is the Government's fault that we are here: that the medical laboratory scientists had to go out on the picket lines and that the public health services were impacted in recent days as a result of the strike. The medical laboratory scientists did everything to engage. They deferred strike action earlier this year in order to engage again, but the Government did not listen and it did not respond because it is penny-pinching on giving these people what it was already accepted they deserved, namely, pay parity with the clinical biochemists. The urgency from the point of view of the health service is based on being able to retain these people and prevent them going into the private sector where they can get decent pay. It is the Government's fault. It is still dragging its heels, even in the amendment claiming it does not have the money when it clearly has. That is one thing we learned about Covid.

We were told for years that we did not have the money for this or that but then billions were found, and rightly so, to respond the Covid pandemic, money that we were told previously did not exist. The money does exist. The economy continues to grow. We had an Oxfam report this week showing that the nine billionaires in this country saw their wealth increase by €15 billion during the two years of the pandemic. Some people are doing extremely well but apparently we do not have the money to pay the medical biochemists who are so critical to the quality of our health service. It is absolutely disgraceful.

The Government needs to step up to the mark and stop saying that has to work in tandem with the partnership process. The medical scientists in the MLSA are proof of the failure of the partnership system because they got left behind. For 20 years, they were left behind because of this convoluted benchmarking system involving relativity and so on. The Government must engage with the people themselves. It must value and respect these workers for the work they do for all of us. In a way, they are fighting for many other workers in the health service who are also undervalued. We are understaffed across so many areas of the health service because we do not treat our health workers with the respect they deserve.

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