On International Nurses Day, I pay tribute to all nurses and midwives throughout the country, particularly in Kildare. We are fortunate to have Naas General Hospital in Kildare North, but many of the nurses and midwives in my home town of Maynooth, Celbridge, Leixlip, Clane and Kilcock work in Blanchardstown, Tallaght, St. James's and HSE service providers around the country. For a long time, one of those nurses was my mum. She worked in Stewarts Care for over 30 years. She trained to be a nurse in Clonsilla. The working conditions for her became far too much at one stage, so much so that she has now left intellectual disability nursing and has moved into special education, initially as a teacher and now as an SNA. I have seen first hand with my mum, a single mother of four children, the difficulty she had, particularly with the working conditions, the late hours and trying to raise four young children, my three sisters and me. There are silver linings in how more nurses are coming on stream. I look at Maynooth University, for example, my alma mater in my hometown. Professor Fintan Sheerin has established a school of nursing there. Professor Sheerin trained to be a nurse with my mum in Clonsilla. That school has grown from strength to strength over the past year, and it is exciting to see the work happening in Maynooth University under Professor Sheerin's leadership. It shows that more can be done to train more nurses across all disciplines of nursing and all disciplines of medicine. Looking to the future, I had a call last Friday from a young mum, an ICU nurse, who had moved back to Kildare from the United Arab Emirates, UAE. She had spent a number of years there with her husband and their two daughters. She had difficulties getting the eldest child into school. The child is going to a Gaelscoil now, even though she did not speak any Irish. She had to get grinds in the UAE. Then there are similar difficulties with childcare for the youngest daughter. There is an issue for my generation, in particular. I am 36. Many my friends and a lot of people of a similar age who moved to the UAE or Australia are now looking to move home. We need those specialist nurses and healthcare providers to come back here. There should be assistance there and a pathway for them to come home. That could involve assisting with securing accommodation, education, childcare - basic fundamentals in which the State has a role. Certainly, the HSE should be looking to try to help more Irish medical professionals to come home. They want to come home. We have seen the difficulties with people trying to obtain somewhere to rent or to buy. There should be assistance provided in that regard. In the Minister of State's constituency in Limerick, for example, assistance could be given to particular nurses who are trying to find accommodation in Limerick or in Clare. The same could be done in Kildare in order that there would be assistance for people seeking to come home, and that when they do come home, they are not scrambling to try to find childcare or school places for their children. It is the least we can do. The HSE needs to look at this as part of a proper campaign. I think it would benefit not only the healthcare professionals - in this instance nurses and midwives - but also the State. The State would benefit greatly from experienced and knowledgeable nurses, midwives and doctors being brought back here. We need their experience and expertise, and our healthcare system would be better because of them. It is already better because of the nurses and the midwives we have in the country. I pay tribute to all the nurses, all the midwives and my mum for the incredible work they do in helping people. Nursing is the noblest of careers, and I thank them for their work.

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