Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The number of nurses in our health service has been increasing dramatically in the lifetime of this Government. Since January 2020, right across the health service we have increased the number by almost 29,000 whole-time equivalents. It really has been a huge increase. Deputy Murphy asked specifically about nurses and midwifery. In the lifetime of this Government, the nursing and midwifery workforce has grown by nearly 10,000. This has been much needed and they are doing huge work. A 10,000-person increase in nursing and midwifery staff is very significant.

When it comes to the embargo, it is so frustrating. We funded the HSE last year to increase the workforce by 6,000, a record number. The HSE did not stop at 6,000; it kept going to increase the number to 8,000. We now have more than 2,000 extra staff in the HSE for whom there is no funding for their salaries. Obviously, we are still paying their salaries, but there was no funding allocated for their salaries so action needed to be taken. It may come as a surprise to many that, in spite of the embargo which we want to resolve and move away from as quickly as we can, actually, the number of nurses in the HSE this year has increased by about 500. For certain posts where somebody might have retired or resigned, a hospital might be told post cannot be filled for now, although we know they are using agency workers at a level they have never used it before either, so a lot of agency staff are being brought in for those posts.

In spite of that, there are 500 more nurses working in the HSE today then there were on 1 January. I will come back on this in my response.

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