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

When I studied economics in school, there was a debate about what created value in society. There was one page about Karl Marx, which stated that he argued that all value derived from the labour of workers. There was one paragraph that said Karl Marx was wrong and that it is much more complicated. It then went on to say that entrepreneurial skill, capital, rent and various other factors were also involved in generating wealth and value. Interestingly, the economics textbook did not mention that Adam Smith and David Ricardo, two of the classical economists who supported market economics, agreed with Marx. This is something that is rarely commented on. They said that all value derives from labour. We are discovering, notwithstanding the dismissals in the economic textbooks I was forced to read, that Marx, Smith and Ricardo were right. It is the workers who make the world go round. We are discovering it at the moment because we have oodles of capital and budget surpluses where the Government is swimming in money, but we do not have the workers to build the houses we need. We do not have the workers to make our hospitals function. We do not have the workers to sufficiently populate our schools with teachers. You can go on through the list of areas, such as IT workers and so on. Things grind to a halt without workers.

Often, those workers are not recognised for their value and for the fact that they make things that make the world go round. Without them, we would be in deep trouble, but we do not recognise them. In fact, we start making it difficult for many people at an early age to get an education in our universities because we charge them fees. This prevents whole sections of society from access to developing the skills and creativity they have.

I will cite nurses as an example. I will not disclose my source, but I understand the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland says that this year more graduate student nurses are looking for certificates to work abroad than they are looking for certificates to work here. They are leaving because we are not looking after them. They have to struggle to qualify as nurses and midwives. They have to do unpaid work when they are on placement. Then, when they graduate as nurses, they cannot afford to live. From speaking with the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation earlier, I know that nurses are spending, on average, approximately 75% of their income on accommodation. That is just not sustainable. As a result, they leave because we do not pay them properly and do not provide them with affordable accommodation.

To give another example, I was contacted in March - and the Minister of State, Deputy Niall Collins, will be interested in this - by housekeepers and domestic cleaners in hospitals in University Hospital Limerick, Cork University Hospital and Letterkenny University Hospital. All of them said that these are the courses they have to study as cleaners: antimicrobial resistance and infection control hand hygiene; dignity at work; fundamentals of the general data protection directive; chemical safety in the workplace; putting on and taking off PPE in acute healthcare; introduction to children's first; manual handling and cybersecurity awareness, to name just a few. That is what you need to be able to keep our hospitals clean. We learned this during Covid-19. There was a re-evaluation exercise after Covid-19, and those workers did not get a re-evaluation. Therefore, they did not get any increase in their pay, which they are fuming about. We need to value workers and not put obstacles in the way of their being able to qualify. We must also treat workers who are often treated very badly a hell of a lot better than they are being treated.

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