Next Wednesday, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, will commence industrial action, and the Psychiatric Nurses Association, PNA, is to follow in February. The Government sits on its hands. Last April, Sinn Féin introduced a motion to the Dáil that was agreed unanimously but the Government has refused to implement its recommendations. It called on the Government to work with unions to draw up a roadmap for full pay equality, with an implementation plan to deliver pay equality within a short timeframe, not the eight years the Government had in mind. Despite this, at the eleventh hour letters are being sent informing patients of cancelled surgeries. It is clear that the Government has failed comprehensively to tackle the recruitment and retention crisis. It refuses to accept pay is an issue and that this needs to be resolved. I ask the Taoiseach to ask the Minister for Health to appear before the Dáil to explain to its Members, who voted last April and set out a series of reasonable, thoughtful steps that the Government might take, why he has ignored the motion agreed by the Dáil and allowed this situation to escalate to the point of industrial action, which we are facing.

I will deal with the matter as it relates to public pay. I will deal with each of the Deputy's contentions in turn. Her first was that the Government has sat on its hands regarding this issue. She will be aware that we had a commitment under the current pay agreement to put in place the Public Service Pay Commission. We honoured that commitment. There was a commitment that this issue would be the first that the commission would examine. That is what happened. The commission then issued a recommendation, which the Government accepted immediately, in the next few days. We made a specific commitment in our budget to honour those commitments. Since then, extensive engagement has taken place between the HSE and the representatives of the nurses. The matter is now very likely to be referred for further engagement in our industrial relations machinery and the Government will play its full role in this process. We have to be conscious, however, of all the other public servants, the tens of thousands of others, to whom we have also made commitments. We have a duty to them just as we have a duty to seek to resolve this issue.

The Deputy's final point was on the effort we made to deal with new entrant pay and determine how the matter could be dealt with. We put in place a comprehensive plan in this regard that was accepted by the leadership of many of the key unions. We are now engaging actively with them to determine whether there are ways in which this issue can now be resolved.

There is a strike on Wednesday. Well done.