Déanaim comhbhrón le muintir an cheathrair óig a fuair bás i dTír Chonaill ag an deireadh seachtaine. I want to join the Taoiseach and on behalf of Sinn Féin, to extend sincere and heartfelt sympathy to the families and friends of the four young men who lost their lives in west Donegal at the weekend and to all who have lost their lives on our roads. Our thoughts are with all of those affected. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a n-anamacha.

I am struck by the very laissez-faire approach the Taoiseach is taking to the fact that in less than 24 hours, members of the INMO are due to commence industrial action in the first of a number of 24-hour stoppages over the coming weeks and his detachment from the fact that members of the PNA will also engage in industrial action. I am sure he knows, as I do, that strike action is the very last thing nurses or midwives, or any medical professional for that matter, wish to undertake but, regrettably, nurses and midwives have been backed into a corner and forced to engage in industrial action because of the action, or inaction, of the Government.

Every day, every week, as the Taoiseach will be well aware, procedures are cancelled across our hospitals. That is due not least to the recruitment and retention crisis affecting the nursing and midwifery professions, and the associated issue of pay is one of the most significant problems affecting the health service. It has been an ongoing issue for many years, yet the Government has completely and abjectly failed to address this and the situation has deteriorated. The Taoiseach cannot pretend that this is an issue that takes him by surprise.

Nurses, midwives and their unions have continually sought meaningful engagement to address the problem of staffing shortages as well as pay issues but he has brushed their concerns aside. It is our nurses and midwives who have acted in a responsible and mature manner. For his part, the Taoiseach has decided to disengage. Nurses make a significant contribution to the health service and to society. They deserve - and I have absolutely no doubt will enjoy - our full support in their demand for a better health service. Last April, we passed a motion in this House, which demanded that the Government engage meaningfully with the unions to draw a roadmap to full pay equality with an implementation plan to deliver same within a short timeframe, not the eight years that it has offered up.

At the 11th hour, with thousands of surgeries cancelled and with strike action due to commence in the morning, will the Taoiseach do as the nursing unions have asked and directly intervene? Will he intervene as a matter of urgency? Will he listen to what the nurses and their unions are telling him? They believe that this dispute can be resolved within the strictures and the conditions of the pay agreement. They want the Taoiseach, as the employer and as the Head of Government, to intervene, stop sitting on the sidelines, get involved and sort this out.

It is important to put on the record of the House once again that we have a pay deal already not just with nurses and midwives but with all public servants, and that pay deal runs until 2020. It provides for pay increases of approximately 7% over that period, full pay restoration for anyone earning under €80,000, increments,and special increases for the low paid and those recruited after 2012. That comes at a considerable cost - a cost of approximately €400 million this year alone.

I do not know where we will be as a country in ten or 12 weeks' time. If we end up in a scenario whereby we have a hard Brexit with no deal, that will change things. The Minister for Finance will produce figures later on what the Department of Finance's estimates are on how a no-deal Brexit could impact on our economy. They are similar to the figures produced by the Central Bank last week and they are less optimistic than those produced by the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI and Copenhagen Economics earlier. They indicate that our economy will slow down. It will not go back into recession and it will not be like the financial crisis ten years ago, but our economy will slow down, and while employment will continue to grow, unemployment will rise as well. In ten or 12 weeks, we could find ourselves needing to find a lot of money to save people's jobs because there are people working in the food industry, agriculture, small and medium enterprises, SMEs, and small exporters whose jobs may be under threat in a few weeks. I have to be Taoiseach for the whole country and I have to bear in mind that in a few weeks or a few months, we could be talking about job losses in certain sectors of the economy and not pay rises, and it would be irresponsible of me not to admit that to this House and not to put it into this debate for discussion.

On intervention and engagement, we have a mechanism by which we resolve disputes such as this and we have State bodies that engage in dispute resolution. They are the WRC and the Labour Court, and the Government is part of those conversations. Disputes are always resolved in the end and this dispute will be resolved in the end, but there are parameters under which it can be resolved. It has to be affordable for the taxpayer, it has to be fair to all other public servants, including other people working in the health sector, and it has to be fair to patients.

Listening to the Taoiseach, one would never think this is the Government presiding over the construction of the most expensive hospital in the world, one would never think this is the Government presiding over €1.2 million of expenditure every week on agency nursing, a figure that is rising and will continue to rise, and one would never think the Taoiseach is the Head of the Government that has been comfortable with pay rises for politicians and gold-plated pensions. I could go on and on.

It is a new low for the Taoiseach to reach for Brexit to explain away his dereliction of duty and failure in respect of our nurses and midwives. Brexit is not of their making. Brexit or no Brexit, people need top quality health services. Brexit or no Brexit, people need their surgical procedures, outpatient appointments and so on. Brexit or no Brexit, we need to deal with these issues. Brexit or no Brexit, the Taoiseach, as Head of Government, ought to intervene directly, as the nursing unions have asked him to do, to find a fair and meaningful settlement for our nurses and midwives. I am very well aware of and familiar with the industrial relations apparatus of the State and guess what? The nurses and the midwives are too. They are also aware that the buck stops with the Taoiseach because he is the person in charge. He is the Head of Government. It is unacceptable for him to sit on the sidelines in circumstances where he knows that their pay claim is just and justifiable, and must be resolved.

The Deputy's time is up.

It is unacceptable for him to sit on his hands on the sidelines and do nothing. I put the question to him again: what does he propose to do as Taoiseach to intervene now, albeit at the 11th hour, to sort this matter out, and not just to try to avert the strike action tomorrow but the strike actions that will surely follow in the weeks and months ahead?

In terms of the facts, the national children's hospital will not be the most expensive hospital in the world; Karolinska in Stockholm alone will cost-----

It is not even built yet.

Then ours will be the second most expensive hospital in the world.

-----between €2 billion and €6 billion.

The Taoiseach's researchers worked hard to find that one.

Please allow the Taoiseach to respond.

I do not think that correcting a factual inaccuracy should cause such laughter and controversy. It was a factual error.

Ours will be the second most expensive hospital in the world.

Can the Taoiseach be so sure of the final costings?

The Deputy must be aware at this stage that back in 2013 Ministers in the then Government decided that they would not accept any pay restoration and have not done so. I am not sure that is true of Sinn Féin TDs by the way.

There is a way by which Government intervenes to resolve industrial relations disputes. It is done through the Workplace Relations Commission and if that fails, it is done through the Labour Court. Those talks are ongoing at the moment and the Government representatives are there and deeply engaged.

It is easy for Deputy McDonald to be populist-----

The Taoiseach does a fair bit of that himself.

-----and just promise everything to everyone, every interest group, and promise it now. The buck does stop with me and that is why I have to be honest with people. There are parameters under which we can come to a solution and there are solutions that are beyond those parameters. It has to be something that we can afford as taxpayers----

An amnesty for Bloomberg but not for ourselves.

-----and it has to be something that takes into account that there are other people working in the health sector and there are other public servants, and we cannot afford a special deal for everyone, so we have to bear in mind things that do matter. Can taxpayers afford it? What will the impact be on other public servants-----

The Taoiseach's time is up.

-----and their claims, which Deputy McDonald has said nothing about today, and also how can we make sure that we are fair to patients?

I think the Taoiseach is out of kilter with the rest of the country but that is not unusual. There is massive support for the nurses and if they have to go on picket duty the length and breadth of the country tomorrow, they will be joined by other groups of workers, by members of their community and by hundreds of people who will be beeping horns and showing them support because they want them to win, not because they want the sort of headlines that we see in the newspapers today, that the average staff nurse is earning €53,000 that will rise to €55,000 by next year, which are lies, damned lies and statistics used against the nurses at this 11th hour to try to condemn them on the picket lines. I hope none of this is coming from the Taoiseach's spin machine. We have all read the INMO submission regarding this dispute which shows that the starting salary of a staff nurse is €29,000 a year and only goes up to €45,000 after 15 years. That goes to the nub of why we are here having this argument.

I want to say, on behalf of Solidarity-People Before Profit, that we fully support the nurses if they go out on strike.

I hope that they will not be put down by spin machines and propaganda that tries to make them out as being totally selfish. The Taoiseach and his Government are standing up, all macho, and shaping up to the nurses. They have a hard neck to think they can blame them for taking action when Brexit is happening. How dare he mention Brexit in the same sentence as their strike. These people do not want to go on strike, have not done so for 20 years and have only done so once in their 100-year history. I will read from the submissions given to The Irish Times by many nurses. One starts: "I love being a nurse." The statement continues:

I don’t love living at home because I can’t afford to save and pay rent. I don’t love that my brother makes more money as a waiter. I don’t love missing breaks because we’re short staffed. I don’t love having to cancel any plans I had after work because I’m so exhausted. I don’t love telling my patients there is a 10-hour wait to see a doctor.

The Taoiseach should read it. He should know, having been involved in the health service, that these are the lives that they lead. Unless this dispute is resolved by putting pay at its centre and treating them justly, the Taoiseach cannot continue to stand here, earning six times what a nurse earns. Is he worth six nurses? I think six nurses are worth much more. We cannot contain that situation forever. Pay has to be put at the heart of this and Joe Public knows that is the reason because Joe Public wants a better health service and knows that unless we pay and retain nurses, we will continue with 3,000 children waiting to see a psychiatrist for the first time, a trolley crisis, and a health service that is creaking at the seams. The Taoiseach and the Minister for Health cannot resolve it unless they deal with pay for nurses. The Taoiseach may end up dealing with it but he should not blame the nurses with regard to Brexit or for the cancellations that may take place because of tomorrow's strike or next week's strikes.

I have absolutely no doubt about the depth of feeling of midwives and nurses about their pay, terms and conditions. I do not doubt the considerable public support which they will have over the coming days and weeks, if it comes to that. Deputy Bríd Smith is in a different position from me. She is a populist. She stands up in the Dáil every day of every week and supports everyone's cause all the time and everywhere.

We do not support Apple getting its money back.

Her support for nurses and midwives is insincere because it is meaningless, because she supports everyone's cause. That is not a realistic position. I have to be honest with people. Department of Finance projections indicate that in the event of no deal on Brexit, unemployment in Ireland will rise. The Central Bank said the same last week. This is not made up and is not a matter of blaming anyone. It is about being honest with people. We could be in a situation in a few weeks where some people may lose their jobs.

Do not waste a good crisis.

We need to bear that in mind with any decisions we make as a Government. Efforts are under way in the Labour Court to resolve this. We want to resolve it and to avert the strike tomorrow. We do not want to have industrial action next week or the following week which adversely affects patients in any way but any solution we come to has to be affordable for taxpayers or it will not be sustainable. It has to be fair to all public servants, including the other people who work in the health service and in other parts of our public services. It is not possible to meet everyone's demands and it would not be fair to do a special deal for one group and then tell the others that we have nothing for them. It also has to be fair for patients. Those are the parameters within which we are working in the Labour Court to come to a resolution.

If I am a populist with nurses and a population that relies on them, I am proud to be so. The Taoiseach must feel ashamed to be a populist as he sits with the elite in Davos and defends the fact he is not taking the €13 billion of Apple tax. How popular is that? It is popular with multinational corporations that do not pay their taxes and with bankers but it is certainly not popular with the psychiatric nurses and those who will be on the picket line tomorrow. It is not popular with the majority of people. Please do not be a hypocrite and use Brexit as a stick to beat the nurses with. We should use the Apple tax as a stick to beat the Taoiseach and his Government with because what he is doing is outrageous. Tomorrow, on the picket lines, I call on all communities and workers to show solidarity.

If they mount a demonstration outside this House in a couple of weeks, and if the hard-nosed, macho Government insists that those in a workforce with a majority of women do not deserve the pay rise they are looking for, we should bring this country to a standstill because they are out defending the health service not for selfish reasons but for every single one of us. It would be nice to see the Taoiseach on a picket line in the morning but he certainly will not be because he will be eaten, beaten and thrown up again unless he is willing to pay the nurses. We will be on the picket lines, showing solidarity with teachers, ancillary workers and other workers and even nurses who are not members of these unions but who say they will not pass the pickets. The Taoiseach should go to the picket lines tomorrow if he is genuine-----

The Deputy's time is up.

-----about what he is saying, but we all know he is not. He will be defending his position on the Apple tax rather than defending our front-line services.

I call the Taoiseach to conclude on this matter.

I will again outline to the Deputy the facts, for what they are worth. All €13 billion has been collected from Apple-----

It is all sitting in an escrow account.

-----and will stay in the escrow account until the European Court of Justice decides who the rightful owners of that money are. That is-----

Why did the Government not decide? Why did it not take the money?

The Deputy should allow the Taoiseach to respond.

If Deputy Bríd Smith does not know that, she is-----

The Government appealed the decision. It is fighting it in a court.

-----really not following this issue very closely at all. To answer the Deputy's question, if I am permitted to, the €13 billion-----

Plus.

-----from Apple has been collected, is in an escrow account and will stay there until the courts decide who the rightful owners are.

Pathetic.

It is important to bear in mind that it could be taxpayers in other parts of Europe.

Britain, absolutely no one else, is to blame for Brexit. I am not interested in beating anyone with sticks. That is entirely the Deputy's language. I am interested in trying to find a solution. This is why we are working in the Labour Court to try to come to a solution. I am certain that, as is the case with all industrial relations disputes, this dispute will be resolved. I want to see it resolved in a way that limits the harm to patients, is affordable for taxpayers and is fair to all public servants, including other people working in our health service and people working in other parts of the public service, who also have demands. It is not possible to meet all these demands in one year.

The Taoiseach will pay the nurses then. Good on him.