Nurses and midwives will be joined in industrial action next week by psychiatric nurses, which will bring the total to 50,000 nurses. Some 500 paramedics from the ambulance service are also coming out next week so it is looking like a spring of discontent. The psychiatric nurses are members of my union and the issues are pay, terms and conditions and the mental health budget. Last year, the entire mental health budget was spent on agencies so there was nothing left of the much-trumpeted increase. Can the Leader confirm when the Minister for Health, Deputy Harris, will come to this House to answer to Members? As Senator Gavan stated, the window between now and next week is fairly small but hopefully the Minister will accept the invitation to sit down for talks without the insulting preconditions he has been offering up to this point. We do not know how this is going to unfold but hopefully the parties will sit down together respectfully.

I stand in support of the nurses who are out picketing today. I stood in the rain and cold on Tuesday with nurses in Waterford and listened to their stories about how unfairly they feel they are being treated. I saw members of the community coming with flasks of tea and coffee and all kinds of provisions to support them. They stated that nurses cared for them and they wanted to pay them back. I also want the Minister to come to the House. The nurses in Waterford do not want to be out on a picket but there have been decades of failure on the part of the Government to support them.

Well said.

It is time the Minister accounted for it. Why are the Ministers, Deputies Harris and Donohoe, not sitting down with the unions and communicating with them and seeing what the problem is? There is no dialogue happening. The only dialogue we hear is in media accounts of what is happening.

I saw the nurses on strike in Waterford but I went into the strike committee centre in the hospital and saw how they were co-ordinating to make sure the wards were supported. Nurses were being taken from the picket when there was demand for them. They are caring and willing but at their wits' end. It is unfair that our nurses are out on the picket lines in this cold weather. The Government is at fault, not the nurses.

A nurse from Waterford, Breda Jones, said this is their Rosa Parks moment and they are standing up. They should have been standing up ages ago. I ask the Government Members to take their heads out of the clouds, get down to earth, and speak to the IMO, the nurses and the people who are supporting them. The situation is atrocious.

A 2017 ESRI reported concluded that: "Two decades of rapid population growth, a decade of cutbacks in public provision of care and a consequent build-up of unmet need and demand for care [will require] additional expenditure, capital investment and expanded staffing and will have major implications for capacity planning, workforce planning and training." Bearing in mind the rainy day fund and money being wasted by the Government, would it, for God's sake, support our nurses because they need care?

Hear, hear.

Well said.