Northside home care pay
Deputy Murphy raised the low pay and strike action of Northside Home Care assistants, arguing they were excluded from the section 39 agreement despite doing comparable work. The Taoiseach acknowledged their contribution and outlined the existing WRC agreement framework covering section 39 and related bodies.
There are about 20 Northside Home Care healthcare assistants in the Gallery. These workers are on strike today. Some of them have worked for 25 years and are only paid €15.04 an hour. Others are on minimum wage. They get approximately 30% less than others doing the same job. They provide vital care for about 500 people on a daily basis. The reason for this ultimately is the HSE has arbitrarily excluded them from being treated as section 39 workers. When this was raised with the Taoiseach when they were on strike in January, he said he would "talk to the Minister and the HSE, to see if the issue can be satisfactorily resolved, averting any necessity for further industrial action". Yet here we are, back again. Will the Taoiseach ask the Minister for Health to meet with these workers and instruct the HSE to treat them properly, give them pay parity and treat them as section 39 workers?
Comment on this
I acknowledge the very significant contribution healthcare assistants make to our health system. The difficulty here is there was a Workplace Relations Commission hearing on 10 March last year between ICTU unions and the relevant Departments. An agreement was reached on pay and conditions but that applied to section 39 organisations under the health Acts, section 56 of the Child and Family Agency Act 2013, section 10 of the housing Act and section 40 of the Domestic, Sexual, and Gender-Based Violence Agency Act 2023. It applied to all bodies falling within those. There are many healthcare assistant work and homecare services, such as the Northside Home Care Service, which are funded through a separate, competitive, tendering process. That is a separate mechanism to the funding of section 39 organisations. The HSE says those tender processes and services commissioned by those tender processes are governed by separate contractual arrangements with providers. There is an issue there. It is not easily resolved. I will talk to the Minister. There is a one-day stoppage. We do not want industrial action taking place. I appreciate that people feel they need to do it. I will talk to the Minister again and see what we can do about it.