I want to return to the strike by health support workers. Some 10,000 health support workers are due to take industrial action next Thursday. Their trade union, SIPTU, has worked patiently for years through the industrial relations machinery of the State, as the Taoiseach has said. The workers' employer is the HSE, which willingly took part in the public service stability agreement and formally signed off on it. The HSE accepted the recommendations of the job evaluation scheme that was agreed in 2017. It set out the staff numbers to be upgraded and to be re-evaluated with regard to remuneration. However, the HSE is now refusing to honour those recommendations. The 10,000 workers in question are the backbone of our health services across 38 hospitals and healthcare facilities. They provide household, porter and catering facilities. They also provide direct assistance to medics as healthcare assistants, maternity care assistants, laboratory aides and surgical instrument technicians. Their strike is not about any new pay claim but about requiring the Government to honour its side of an agreement that both sides entered into freely. As the Taoiseach knows, workers delivered on very difficult pay deals during the economic crisis. They honoured agreements which were instrumental in securing our economic recovery. It would be an act of betrayal for the State to go back on its commitments now.

What is at stake is not simply the honouring of an agreement but the maintenance between the State and employees of fundamental trust. SIPTU has called on the Minister for Health to intervene. The Government should not have allowed matters to reach this point. The workers involved are essential to the running of our health system and they are also among the lowest paid. Does the Taoiseach accept that this re-evaluation process was formally agreed between the unions and employers? Why is the Government undermining confidence in the HSE and the Department of Health as honest dealmakers in the name of the State? Will the Taoiseach or Minister for Health intervene to ensure this strike is averted by Thursday?

The Deputy will be aware that I answered a question on the same matter from Deputy Micheál Martin a little earlier but perhaps I can add a few things. The dispute is related to the non-implementation of the job evaluation scheme for support grades. SIPTU claims that this is a breach of the terms of the public sector pay agreements. Management agreed to the terms of the scheme but questions of its implementation were always intended to be subject to further discussions at the conclusion of the exercise. My understanding is that the commitment was to consider the outcome but not to implement it automatically.

As part of the talks which took place under the Lansdowne Road agreement, a chairman's note was agreed by all parties on the re-introduction of the job evaluation scheme. On this basis, discussions commenced in 2016 between the HSE, SIPTU and IMPACT, which is now Fórsa, with regard to the re-establishment of those schemes. Successful engagement with Fórsa led to the approval of the job evaluation scheme for clerical and administrative grades in August 2016. However, an agreement on a scheme for support staff grades could not be reached and the issue was referred to the Lansdowne Road agreement oversight body in early 2017. The oversight body considered the approval of the scheme and recommended that parties should proceed with the job evaluation scheme as planned. It advised that the question of implementing the outcome of the exercise would be considered by the parties at the conclusion thereof. The dispute now centres on the timelines for implementing the outcome of the first two phases. SIPTU is firmly of the view that there was a commitment to pay not earlier than the completion of the second phase but in advance of the completion of the entire process.

Phase 2 was completed in October 2018. Phase 3 involved home help and home care workers. Phase 4 is made up of other support staff grades. Phase 3 is complete but has not yet been reported on and phase 4 is only now under way.

The Taoiseach will accept that I know something about the Lansdowne Road agreement. The re-evaluation process was to be held before the economic crisis. By agreement, those matters were put into abeyance until such time as we again had the capacity to pay. With the forbearance and agreement of the unions and the workers in the health service, there was a clear understanding that once the re-evaluation of the job specifications was completed, the remuneration appropriate to the new grading would apply. These are relatively low-paid workers who have accepted a series of pay agreements on the understanding that the State would honour them. It is my judgment that the non-payment of this evaluation is a breach of what was agreed. I ask the Taoiseach to intervene in order to ensure that trust is restored and that the workers get that to which they are entitled.

As the Deputy knows better than I, there are mechanisms by which we can and do resolve such disputes. Talks took place at the Workplace Relations Commission yesterday and adjourned at 7 p.m. without agreement. The option is there now to go to the Labour Court to have this decided and finalised. That is what I suggest as the next step forward. That is how so many disputes have been resolved in the past and it is how this dispute can be resolved in order to avoid the strike on Thursday and the unnecessary disruption for patients to which it will give rise.

I should put on record the fact that the cost of implementing the first two phases - phases 3 and 4 are not yet complete - will be approximately €16 million a year. It would be remiss of me not to point out that the Government has come in for criticism for-----

It would be about a week's overrun in the context of the capital budget.

-----in-year increases in health spending. If we decide to do that, or if the Labour Court says we ought to do that, it will be exactly the thing we are criticised for, which is in-year increases in health spending.

Honouring an agreement is not a breach of anything.

It is very easy to criticise the fact that during the course of the year the Government may decide to spend a few hundred million euro on health, but when one breaks it down, it is often pay increases for workers who deserve it, extra home help or new health programmes that should be funded. It is easy to criticise those things but sometimes they are necessary.

Nobody is criticising them.

But the Government is not doing it.