"Nursing is becoming a passport", "Who will look after us when we get old?", and "How come they can pay bondholders, but not nurses?", are three comments that nurses made to me yesterday. There were recurring themes on the dozens of picket lines visited by myself and my Socialist Party colleagues. We heard of nurses who have no time to talk to patients, which is a fundamental of being a nurse; their feelings of guilt when their 13-hour shifts end; three midwives looking after 23 mothers and their babies on a ward; and trolley beds on wards, which is the overflow from emergency departments. Hospital wards have frankly become dangerous due to ongoing deterioration in the nurse-to-patient ratio. Are we to wait years before this Government recognises there is a crisis in nursing, just like we had to wait with the housing crisis?

Let us be clear. This crisis applies only to the public health system. There were no pickets at private hospitals yesterday because they do not have to adhere to pay agreements. They pay inducements to recruit and retain their nurses. This is about patients and the public health system but it is also about pay. They may have been portrayed as angels over the years, but nurses do not have gossamer wings when the landlord comes looking for the rent. We hear of nurses getting up at 4.30 a.m. because they cannot afford to live in Dublin; nurses for whom mortgages are a thing of the past; and nurses who have been eating beans for the last week up to payday. As one nurse in Connolly hospital said, this is about long-standing abuse of women workers. We hear about the gender pay gap. This is the gender pay gap in action, perpetrated by our own Government.

Does the Tánaiste agree that a society that cannot afford to pay nurses is a sad society we should not tolerate? I note the editorial in The Times Ireland edition urging the Government not to pay nurses. That is how billionaires like Mr. Rupert Murdoch and the establishment feel. They think we do not need a society, just like Margaret Thatcher said. What we saw yesterday was the most powerful display of worker solidarity. Fire-fighters, prison officers and patients visited picket lines.

There was a conveyor belt of pizzas, cakes, donuts and coffee of all kinds because there is an innate solidarity among workers. The Tánaiste's attempt, and the attempt of others, to divide and conquer workers by pitting them against each other will fail. I note the mealy-mouthed words of the Labour Party and Fianna Fáil. I have not heard Labour say “pay the nurses” like a labour party is meant to do because it is reticent about that. One would think that the most dangerous thing-----

Rubbish.

The Deputy need not worry. We know more nurses than she will ever know. She should cop herself on.

They are the Government.

One would think the most dangerous thing in the world was-----

The Deputy should cop herself on.

Deputy Coppinger has the floor.

I thank the Ceann Comhairle. One would think that the most dangerous thing to happen in Ireland was the public sector pay deal unravelling but there is massive wealth in society. ICTU tells us today that chief executive officer, CEO, pay is climbing by 6%. Three people in this economy own €29 billion in wealth. There is not just a little pie for the health service. There is a huge pie of untapped and untaxed resources in this society, as we know by the Apple tax alone.

How do we get out of this situation? First, I would not be playing tough man talking about penalties on nurses because that would stir up massive support from the public, but the Government is in a dilemma because that penalty and threat fails against workers if it is not applied to nurses. That is the reality. I call on the trade union leadership not to allow this strike to linger on but to harness the overwhelming support we saw yesterday between workers and launch a united trade union campaign to give nurses, midwives and psychiatric nurses a reason to stay or to return. Also, equal pay across the public sector should be restored. We cannot recruit teachers either. All workers, public and private, need a pay rise. What is the Tánaiste's alternative to paying the nurses? Do not just pat them on the back and tell them how great they are; they need pay.

I will tell the Deputy what it is not. Our alternative is not what she is proposing, which is to pay everybody what they ask for-----

Tax wealth.

----and to bankrupt the country. That is what her kind of politics delivers-----

And Fianna Fáil's.

It is give everybody what they want every week and borrow money to do it, which then results in the kind of dramatic-----

Tax the wealth to do it.

-----and damaging decision-making that is forced on a government that happened to us a decade ago.

By the party that is propping you up.

We are not going there again. Instead, we are guaranteeing public sector workers that their pay will continue to increase every year, that we will be able to afford to do it, and that we will work with them on pay, allowances, conditions and so on through the public sector pay agreement, which they signed up to, to provide that kind of certainty and ensure we get incremental improvements each year as opposed to trying to be popular, as the Deputy tries to be every week when she demands that the Government delivers more money for everything, despite the fact that she has no answer when asked where that money will come from, apart from take more money from the super wealthy which is supposedly available.

It is there.

We have an obligation to be honest with people. We want to work with nurses. We want to find a solution to this dispute. We want to treat them with respect. We want to use our imagination to try to find a way of doing that within the confines of an agreement to which they and we have signed up. We want to make sure that we can afford to do that so that we do not risk the financial stability of the country again. Surely we have learned those lessons. We should try to be honest with people. We take the point. We are hearing what nurses are saying. We are hearing what the public are saying in terms of their sympathy with nurses but we have to make decisions in a way that is consistent and responsible and linked to agreements already signed up to and to find ways within those parameters of using our imagination in a way that can help and improve work and conditions for nurses. That is what we will do but we will be honest with them, unlike the Deputy.

The Tánaiste said our kind of politics will bankrupt the country. His Government is doing a pretty good job with a housing crisis, a health crisis and all the other crises it has created. He cannot go around boasting about Ireland being the best performing economy and saying there is no money. He simply cannot do both. There is a huge amount of wealth available. He is just not willing to pay nurses and workers. He is happy to pay to lift the cap on bank CEOs but he is not happy to pay nurses. What really annoyed nurses, however, was to hear the Tánaiste going on about Brexit. The nurses were being blamed or linked in with Brexit. That is incredible.

Nobody blamed them.

It seems that no worker is entitled to break out of the public service pay agreement without being punished. What kind of a democracy is that when someone finds they cannot live as rents rise relentlessly around them?

Time is up, Deputy.

If the Tánaiste really respects nurses, do not plámás them with a pat on the back. Give them pay parity with other skilled graduates. That is what they need and that is what they deserve.

If the Deputy respects nurses she should be honest with them in terms of what is possible. She talks about divide and conquer or people playing tough man. We are doing neither of those things. The Deputy is the person who is trying to divide here and encourage more people to go out on strike. What we are trying to do is solve problems, treat people with respect, listen to them and try to ensure that the industrial machinery of the State works in this instance, which we accept is difficult and challenging. We are trying to build a health service that can look after patients in the way everyone in this House wants.

You are not making a very good job of it.

We are dramatically increasing the financial supports for that health sector and we are incrementally increasing salaries and income of nurses and all the other people who work across the health sector. However, we have to do that in a managed way that is controlled and predictable to ensure we do not have the highs and lows of trying to be populist about pay demands in terms of how we respond.

Thank you, Tánaiste.

That is not what this Government will do. We will be honest with the people about what is possible and then sit down and try to work that through with them in a way that recognises that nurses have a tough job to do in very difficult circumstances. We want to work with them through those challenges in a way that is fair but consistent and affordable.