‘CAVING IN ON NURSES’ PAY WILL MEAN A BITTER LEGACY’
PASCHAL Donohoe has spelled out why he believes the Government cannot give in to the pay demands of the nursing unions, even as a continuous three-day stoppage looms next week.
‘A bitter legacy will be reaped if we find ourselves in a situation that any Government in the future is not able to negotiate a collective wage agreement for the public sector in our country,’ the Finance Minister told the Dáil yesterday.
‘It is not at all clear to me how, if this public sector wage agreement comes to a disorderly end, how we will negotiate a new one to take its place.
‘This year alone, the health service would be receiving €17billion of taxpayers’ money to try to improve services – of which at least a quarter goes into the wages of those who provide care in our country.
‘The challenge we have is that we have many other public servants – 290,000 of them – whom we also respect. And if we make any movement for one group, it has consequences for others.’
The Irish Daily Mail has highlighted how meeting and matching the nursing unions’ demands across the whole the public service would amount to an extra €2.2billion every year, necessitating a raft of new charges and taxes or else dramatically slashed public spending or a combination of both.
‘If this wage agreement is destabilised, the public gallery will be full with other public servants on similar demands,’ Mr Donohoe said, having been told that nurses and midwives were in the public gallery yesterday.
While it was obvious that recourse to the Public Service Pay Commission had ‘not yielded outcomes that are satisfactory to our nurses, otherwise we would not be in the situation we are in,’ it remained an independent body, he said.
The Minister also addressed claims that nurses were ‘haemorrhaging’ from the health service. ‘Over the last number of years, there have 3,876 more nurses and midwives recruited. That change has happened,’ he said. ‘The report of the PSPC [on recruitment and retention in nursing] shows that turnover rates stand at 5%, and including retirees, 6.%.’ This was in line with other sectors, he indicated.
Mr Donohoe said the agreement as negotiated did provide that anyone earning below €35,000 would see wage increases, while anyone earning less than €50,000 would have their wages fully restored in 2019, and those up to €70,000 by 2020.
New entrants would benefit by €3,000 from the negotiations concluded with the PSPC and ICTU, he added. Pay restoration was on the way for low and middle-income workers too, he added.
The figure of there being four vacancies for every entrant to nursing was ‘inaccurate’, he said. On average, there were two applicants – 1.86 – for every place on a public service vacancy in the sector, he said, while acknowledging that the nursing strike was a ‘formidable’ problem to solve.
As nurses looked on in the public gallery, Sinn Féin Health spokeswoman Louise O’Reilly warned him however that press releases would not solve the strike, adding that ‘your boss [Leo Varadkar] called it discourteous’ to send an invitation to talks this week via the media.
‘To invite them in and say we will talk about anything, except pay, is an insult. Pay has to be central to it,’ she said.
Independents 4 Change TD Joan Collins TD said: ‘Agency nurses are paid 20% more than the nurses they are working beside in the public service.
‘Meanwhile the Department of Foreign Affairs was paying €1,000 a day for taxis.’
‘We have many public servants’