International Nurses Day should not be treated as an annual exercise in sympathetic, soothing words about how great our nurses are. Nurses do not need another round of empty public praise or applause that carries no willingness to improve their working conditions behind it. Our nurses need a health service that take their safety, their working conditions and their health and well-being seriously. Of course, we should recognise and celebrate the work nurses do. Every day, in hospitals, community services, mental health wards, disability services, older person services, emergency departments and public health settings, nurses carry an enormous share of the health service. They are often the people who notice when a patient is deteriorating; the professional a family turns to when they are frightened or confused; and the worker trying to hold a service together when staffing is short, beds are unavailable and the wider system is failing around them. If the tributes being paid today are to mean anything, we must be honest about what many nurses are asked to endure. One of the clearest examples is violence and aggression at work. A HSE response to a parliamentary question I submitted last year showed there were almost 17,800 reported assaults on HSE staff between 2022 and 2024. These included physical, verbal and sexual assaults reported through the national incident management system. The category of worker most affected was nurses. There was almost 11,000 incidents reported involving nursing staff over those three years. Mental health services accounted for almost 7,500 incidents. Disability services represented over 3,470 and acute hospitals recorded almost 4,000. This means nurses being threatened, punched, kicked, spat at, grabbed, sexually harassed or verbally abused while carrying out their work. We need to be careful and humane in how we discuss these realities. Many incidents happen in settings where patients may be extremely distressed, frightened, intoxicated, psychotic, cognitively impaired, traumatised or unable to regulate their behaviour because of disability, illness or crisis. However, none of that takes from the impact of these assaults on staff. A serious response means safe staffing levels. It means proper training in de-escalation. It means appropriate security where needed and ward and service environments that reduce risk rather than compound it. It means proper follow-up after incidents and psychological support. It means managers and senior decision-makers treating workplace violence as a major occupational hazard, not as background noise in a health service under pressure. Assaults are only one part of the wider picture. Nurses are also dealing with injuries from moving and handling, exhaustion from unsafe staffing, missed breaks, relentless pressure and the psychological toll of trying to deliver safe care inside a system that too often makes that impossible. There is a particular kind of stress and dejection in knowing what a patient needs and not having the staff, time, beds, equipment or community supports to provide it. That is not just frustrating but over time, it is corrosive. It damages morale. It pushes experienced nurses out. It makes recruitment more difficult. It affects patient care. The State cannot keep speaking about retention while ignoring the conditions that drive people away. I want to briefly raise healthcare workers living with long Covid. During the pandemic, healthcare staff were asked to answer the call of duty in settings that were fraught with danger and uncertainty. Many were exposed to Covid before vaccines were available, before PPE was consistent and before the long-term consequences of the virus were properly understood. Some people are still living with those consequences. Long Covid, as we know, can involve debilitating fatigue and pain, cognitive difficulties, breathlessness, post-exertional crashes and a range of other symptoms that make ordinary life extremely challenging, not to mention returning to demanding clinical work. The special Covid leave with pay scheme for public health service employees with long Covid has now ended, with remaining staff moved onto the ordinary sick leave scheme. I welcome the Taoiseach's recent engagement with unions on this issue, but I also want to mention the many nurses as well as other healthcare workers who fell outside eligibility for special Covid leave with pay and who remain disabled by their symptoms and unable to return to work. If nurses are central to the future of healthcare, safe staffing is imperative. If nurses were asked to carry the health service during Covid, those still living with the consequences of the pandemic should not be abandoned. The tribute nurses need is not sentimental social media soundbites; it is protection at work, proper staffing, fair treatment when injured or ill and a health service that stops asking them to absorb the consequences of political failure.

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