Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

The Minister for Health has the neck to come in here and claim that the pay and numbers strategy is not a recruitment moratorium when the health unions are telling us that is precisely what it is. To be clear, it does not matter to health workers or to patient safety whether or not it is officially called a recruitment moratorium. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. The unions would not be protesting or balloting for strike action if this were not a serious issue for workers and for patient safety. The Government's countermotion shows that, as usual, it is speaking out of both sides of its mouth. On one hand, it claims that the previous HSE official recruitment moratorium was necessary. On the other hand, it admits that more recruitment is necessary. On one hand it claims that the HSE has recruited too many staff, but on the other hand it says it is funding the HSE to recruit thousands more staff. Which one is it? Either the Minister for Health and the Government are confused and do not know, or they are deliberately misleading the Dáil. Either way, it is time they stopped gaslighting health workers and the public.

The Government amendment boasts about the number of extra nurses recruited in a range of different hospitals. I was particularly interested to see reference to the increase at Tallaght hospital, suggesting that this has somehow fixed the problem. I can tell him from first-hand experience that it has not. I brought my wife to the emergency department on Thursday night. We got there at approximately 7.30 p.m. and she was seen the next morning at 10 a.m. - 14 and a half hours. She was not the worst. There were people there who had to wait for 17 hours to be seen. When we arrived, there were 152 people waiting. Sick people and older people were sitting on hard chairs overnight because they had emergencies and needed to be seen. This is so normalised that there are announcements on a half-hourly basis saying how many people are waiting and what the average waiting time is. We have normalised the idea that hundreds of people have to wait overnight on a Thursday to get seen in a hospital. Of course, once you get admitted the care you get from the nurses and all of the health staff is excellent. In a rich country, however, this should not be normal and should not be accepted. Patients should not be forced to put up with this and staff should not be forced to work in these conditions. The truth is not that we have too many health staff in our health service; we have nowhere near enough staff. Anyone can see the huge pressure they are under. We should get a commitment to lifting the de facto recruitment moratorium. The Government should listen to front-line health workers, who are the real experts here, and it should invest in recruiting all the necessary staff to provide a first-class single-tier universal health service.

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