During this whole discussion, there have been elements of déjà vu as regards Covid. I was not here but, like many others, I looked at the screen and saw the applause for nurses in the Dáil. It was the height of hypocrisy. There was applause but no pay rises. Long Covid supports have just been ended. Nurses were urged to go onto the front line. It was mainly nurses who suffered from that condition. I seriously wonder how nurses around the country, particularly those at University Hospital Limerick, and nurses abroad feel hearing this debate. This April was the worst on record for overcrowding in the hospitals. Some 11,175 people were treated on corridors according to the INMO's trolley watch. That long-term degradation of their working conditions has an absolutely massive impact on nurses' well-being and so on. They face stress, burn-out and unsafe conditions. In a survey, two thirds of nurses said that staffing levels and the skills mix around them did not meet patients' needs. I could go on forever. One quarter of nurses have gone to their GP due to work-related stress in the past 12 months. To be frank, it does not sound like nurses are valued, does it? The INMO has gathered many statistics on this. Some 61% of nurses are considering leaving nursing and 80% report unsafe conditions. Nearly half of all nurses reported pressure to work extra shifts. I will add something else into the mix. It is International Nurses Day, a day on which we also celebrate midwives. Some 15% of the entire HSE workforce come from international areas. There have been 200 racist incidents against nurses in Ireland in the last year. In some cases, nurses are travelling in groups to their workplaces because they are afraid. One member of the INMO said that things like verbal comments and exclusion can have an impact and that this comes on top of everything else you are getting on with. That is a real issue because we rely so heavily on nurses coming here from other jurisdictions. They should be treated with respect. What do nurses want? It is obvious. They want safe working conditions, decent pay so they can actually afford to live, and to feel they are able to keep going in the job. We need massive investment in the health service to provide the staff that are needed and to get rid of the unsafe working conditions nurses are being forced to put up with. We need less applause and fewer statements on International Nurses Day. Once again, a highly feminised workforce is just expected to put up with crap again and again.

Sentiment score: -0.05