It is a little over a year since medical scientists went on strike for the first time in 60 years. Since then, the independent Medical Scientist Grade Assessment Report by Conall Devine was commissioned and reported and vindicated the position of medical scientists and their legitimate claim for pay parity with clinical biochemists. The report was published in January this year yet still five months on, medical scientists are forced to wait. The HSE, the Department of Health and the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, refuse to implement the recommendations of the report. They fight at the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, and the Labour Court and meanwhile we cannot sustain a cervical screening programme at the Coombe Hospital, waiting lists for biopsy results have lengthened and other services and the profession itself is hanging on by the skin of its teeth. Will the Taoiseach intervene?

These things are always part of an industrial relations process and there is a mechanism by which matters such as this can be resolved. The unions talk to the Government on the one hand and then to the WRC and the Labour Court thereafter if needed. That is the way it works. An intervention from me would not change that.