I am in solidarity with the ambulance workers but I want to take the opportunity to praise the fantastic work of our nurses on what is International Nurses Day. There are over 92,000 registered nurses and midwives in Ireland who all do a fantastic job, but their working conditions are far from optimal. They have raised issues like unsafe staffing numbers, high levels of burnout and pay that has failed to keep up with the cost of living. Ireland relies to a much greater extent on internationally educated nurses compared to many other high-income countries. According to a 2024 ESRI report, 46% of the workforce had been educated abroad while 69% of all new entrants had been trained internationally. That means that over the past two decades, more than half of all nurses registered in Ireland were migrants and we are increasingly reliant on the great work they do. At the same time, Irish nurses continue to move abroad, and many do not come back. Even if they did not emigrate, we still train too few of them in any event, with a 2023 OECD report finding that we produce 31 nursing graduates per 100,000 people compared with 58 in the Netherlands and 109 in Australia. There have been some improvements, but we need to keep our Irish nurses and retain the international ones by paying them better and improving their working conditions, bringing in the likes of a Dublin allowance, because having a vocation only goes so far.

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