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

The Taoiseach was caught out misleading the public, to put it kindly, on the housing completion numbers to try to win an election. Will he now admit that the crisis in our health service is also another area where he has been misleading the public about what is actually going on with regard to the lack of staffing across the health services? This has prompted all of the health workers unions to ballot overwhelmingly for industrial action. This includes nurses, midwives, porters and other grades, together with medical scientists and laboratory assistants, who are all balloting for industrial action over the pay and numbers strategy, which is a backdoor embargo on recruitment in vital areas of the health service. That is the real explanation for why we cannot address the trolley crisis, why there are waiting lists of nearly 1 million people for treatment, and why, for example, we do not have enough public health nurses now to do important developmental checks on young infants. This is all because the Government is preventing health areas and hospitals from being able to recruit the staff they need to actually meet patient need. Will the Taoiseach scrap the pay and numbers strategy so that we do not end up with strikes in this country by health workers being used to break through this embargo?

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