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

I thank Sinn Féin for tabling the motion. I thank friends and comrades in the NAS and Dublin Fire Brigade for talking to me in the last while and sharing notes with me. I am proud to say that I have got to know a lot of them very well over the last few years, particularly since I was a councillor. DFB was and still is run by the council. It is still under-funded. It always has been. I forget the year, but at one point the city manager, as he was then called – he is now called the CEO, which is a set of words that should not be lost on anybody and indicates that the city is run as a sort of company rather than for the services of the people - was trying to move away from the provision of the ambulance service and the Dublin Fire Brigade service because it was so expensive. A service like that is expensive and should be and must be expensive if it is to be good, of high quality and the staff are to be well trained, well paid and well looked after and if it is to respond to the emergency needs of the citizens, both of the cities and the rural towns and areas in the country.

The NAS is similarly way underfunded and understaffed and workers in that service have had quite a long struggle to get trade union recognition for the National Ambulance Service Representative Association, NASRA. We have been in this Chamber arguing for that trade union recognition for them and got a motion passed that the Government would seek to discuss this with the HSE so that it would recognise NASRA’s rights and talk to the workers and recognise their role in all this. In the meantime we had Covid and now we have a crisis in the delivery of the ambulance service. What I find interesting in how the workers view this is that they recognise that while they are underfunded, under strain and understaffed, this is intrinsically linked to the crisis in the health service, etc. because, they say, even if the ambulance service was fully staffed tomorrow, there would still be a failure insofar as there would be a lack of GPs, bed capacity and nurses and there will always be backed up queues for the services when ambulances arrive at emergency departments. If the ambulances were at full capacity, inevitably they would be left waiting outside emergency departments in the current climate and result in stagnant response times. This is compounded by the failure of the Government and the Department to fully resource the service, particularly in rural Ireland where many of the hospitals that closed have left a void and it takes much longer for ambulances to reach the point where they should be able to deliver a patient safely.

I want to talk for a minute about the work that they do. My brother was an ambulance driver and a paramedic. Unfortunately, he is gone from this world quite a long time but every year they write to the family and ask us to go to the annual mass. I am not into religion but I do go to the mass out of respect for him and the workers. It is quite impressive to see how proud they are of what they do, of the service they deliver, of the job and the employment they have and the comradery between each other and for each other and for the patients that they look after. In that sort of a job that sense of solidarity and comradery is important to have because as they say themselves, the sort of sacrifices they put up with, particularly when the service is under pressure means they consistently put their own welfare to one side; they often work for five, six or more hours after shifts are finished; they repeatedly skip meals and rest times; and they sacrifice family events and their life-work balance and ignore their own mental and physical health needs. This applies not just to the National Ambulance Service but to the paramedics and the men and women of Dublin Fire Brigade as well. They shoulder the burden of the criticisms of the community and when people cannot get an ambulance and they are waiting for ages for one, what they see is the ambulance driver and the paramedic, not the Government or the Minister for Health and those in the Department who are failing to deliver a service for the community. I, therefore, welcome this motion. We fully support it and we would like to request again that the Government act on the motion that was passed without opposition some time ago in this House, the details of which I can send the Minister, particularly where it states that the Government should act on talking to the HSE to push it to discuss the question of trade union recognition with the branch of the psychiatric nurses union, known as NASRA, which has been trying to get the recognition that it deserves for ten years.

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