Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is nice to see the Minister of State back. How is he doing? I will start by contextualising the conversation we are having today because it is important to do so. Sinn Féin has supported the move to level 5 lockdown. We have done so because we believe it is always best to follow scientific advice wherever possible. As the Minister said earlier, we very much welcome that the numbers are coming down. It shows that level 5 is working and like him, I hope for further sustained progress for the rest of this month. We believe level 5 has the support of the vast majority of the people in this State. It is important that everybody in this Chamber, regardless of political affiliation, unites against the anti-science, anti-mask conspiratorial nonsense that is doing the rounds across social media and occasionally outside the front gates of Leinster House. It is important to combat that. It is always surprising to me that there are still people who are gullible enough to believe some of the nonsense that is out there and it is incumbent on all of us to always challenge it. We have to stick with science and progress as opposed to superstition, and worse, poisonous right-wing nonsense.

The news of a possible vaccine is a potential game changer. The Minister was rightly cautious about it in his speech but I am hoping that when he gets a chance to respond, which will probably be when we continue this debate at the beginning of next week, he might be able to outline his plans for that. I have no doubt the Department has been planning for a vaccine and I hope to hear what those plans entail for ensuring the people who need it most are the ones to get it first. We would like to hear details of those plans, though we accept that the vaccine is not quite there yet. We are all hoping that there will be some further good news in that regard.

I wanted to give that context before I went on to make some genuinely critical points about some of the issues we faced with Covid-19. I am genuinely puzzled by this first matter and my party has brought it up several times. If I go beyond 5 km I am subject to a fine. I get that and for what it is worth I support that particular policy. However, if there is a case of Covid-19 in the workplace, there is absolutely no requirement on the employer to report that case to the Health and Safety Authority, HSA. Given what we have been through in nursing homes and meat factories, not once but on a few occasions, it makes absolutely no sense to me or to anyone in this Chamber that there is no requirement on employers to report cases of Covid-19 to the HSA. It makes no sense but worse than that, it is a huge derogation of responsibility to essential workers in those areas. I would like the Government to act on this.I cannot understand it. If we are putting the health of people first - I believe in terms of the broad policy that we are - surely to God that needs to extend to protecting workers in essential industries. There is no excuse for that. The fact that it used to be the law up to 2016 makes it all the more inexcusable. I ask the Minister of State, Deputy Feighan, to ask the Minister if he comes back next week, to respond to that point please as I think it is a very important one. I know it is one the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and a number of trade unions have raised on a regular basis and they are just not getting answers on it.

The second point I wish to raise concerns testing and tracing. There were some very impressive numbers in the Minister's speech. I hope they are the case but, to be honest, I am not entirely convinced. We have not had an adequate explanation of the appalling means by which people were hired to test and trace positions. Why were the positions outsourced to an agency? Why are we giving millions in additional profits to a private agency to hire these people? Why were they hired on zero-hour contracts? Why is it that when I speak to my trade union colleagues in University Hospital Limerick, I discover that the most recent batch of support staff that was hired was hired through an agency? Why are we outsourcing work? Surely to God we have an extensive HR department in the HSE that should be dealing with this? It just makes no sense to me. I worry about the ideology that is at work within the Department that thinks, first and foremost, about how it can outsource this project. That is a fundamental change of mindset that we need to see within the Department. We need to get away from outsourcing and move to insourcing in terms of how we build longer-term capacity.

Another example of that is the fact that we have 200 fewer permanent nursing staff in the system now than we did a year ago. How on earth can that be the case? In the middle of a Covid crisis, how can it be that we have fewer permanent staff? It goes back to the ideology of hiring people on temporary contracts, if we have to hire them, even though we know there is a significant need for long-term staffing for the healthcare services.

That in turn speaks to issues that have been rightly raised, such as that of pay for student nurses. We were told it was going to be dealt with and here we are months later and it is not dealt with. It is not sufficient to just push this off and say we will deal with it. The Government has been in place for long enough to have dealt with it. We want a satisfactory answer to that because I suspect there is no one in this room who would try to defend not paying student nurses. It is just a question of ensuring that it is done.

I agree with colleagues who have raised the issue of pregnant women not being able to have their partners with them at a crucial time. I would have thought that common sense and a degree of flexibility should have been able to sort that issue by now but, unfortunately, to date it has not.

ICU beds is another issue of real concern. In 2019 the HSE reported that there were 255 critical care beds in the system. The average stay in ICU for most patients is two to three days, but the average stay for somebody with Covid-19 is ten to 14 days, which is much longer. We have to have somewhere to put extra ICU beds and very often they end up in operating theatres, which are in turn closed down to accommodate temporary ICU so procedures are cancelled. As the Minister of State is aware, it takes six ICU staff to look after one bed, so one has to get them from somewhere else, such as coronary care or theatre nurses.

It is on the record that Sinn Féin has called every year for more ICU beds and more acute beds but this advice was, unfortunately, ignored by Fine Gael for the past decade, when it instead cut ICU beds. It is startling to recognise that we now have fewer ICU beds than we did in 2009. How did that happen? When is someone in government going to hold their hands up and say they got this badly wrong?

The final point I wish to make as, unfortunately, I am out of time, is that there needs to be a national conversation about the failing for-profit model of nursing home care, one carefully constructed on the back of millions in euro of subsidies to private sector entrepreneurs. This model has been badly exposed. It has been based on appalling rates of pay, poverty terms and conditions and an aggressive anti-union stance by employers. Incidentally, that is why we never hear from workers in these homes. We only hear from managers and owners. We never see a spokesperson from a union in a nursing home because they are not allowed. There is something fundamentally wrong with that for-profit model and we need to have a proper conversation about it.