John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am sorry if I have delayed the Minister. As he knows, we have a professional relationship as peers in this House, but in my day job I work for him. I was a little bit tied up this morning, delaying my getting here.

What are the contingency plans of the Department and the HSE in the event of the apocalyptic scenario of the great majority of the nurses in the country finding themselves unregistered in approximately six weeks time coming to pass? Without boring the Minister with details with which he is familiar and that he has responsibly been trying to deal with, the nurses feel aggrieved that their registration board has recently asked them for a 50% increase in their registration fees, amounting to an 80% increase in the registration fee over two fee cycles. The nurses feel aggrieved because they correctly believe that they have suffered disproportionately among their peers the ravages of the recession, both in economic, take-home pay terms and in quality of work terms. They have been asked and risen to the task bravely of stepping up and taking on an increased burden in what the Minister honestly admitted recently was a health service that had been subjected to a cycle of cuts that under his stewardship has now thankfully come to an end.

However, the reality is that, during that time, nurses saw their salaries decrease, their workload increase, a failure to replace nurses due to embargoes and the same tax and USC increases and water and housing charges that everyone faced. Their hard question concerns what they have been getting in return for the increased registration fee. The representations that I have received from many nurses were to the effect that they have not felt that the board has given them good value for the fee. I will not go into details or personalise the matter, but the board has had quite a few expenses that the nurses find difficult to understand, for example, public relations costs and travel costs, which I am sure were undertaken for entirely legitimate business by the board. The nurses' sense is that the austerity has not been well spread.

Under instruction from their organisation and with a high degree of loyalty to same, they have indicated that they will not pay the increased fee, but will instead pay last year's fee, which would have the effect of finding the overwhelming number of nurses unregistered by their board by some date in early April. I hope that this will not come to pass, but I would be grateful to know whether there has been contingency planning. I thank the Minister for attending.