Nurses attending the annual conference of the Irish Nurses' Organisation (INO) in Killarney have expressed outrage at the decision by the head of the Health Service Executive (HSE), Prof Brendan Drumm, to accept an €80,000 bonus at a time when nursing staff have to put up with cutbacks.
Lorraine O'Connor, a nurse in Cork, received a standing ovation when she urged the public to "wake up" to what was going on. "You're after paying €80,000 to Brendan Drumm. Make him work for it," she said.
Derek Reilly, a nurse in Naas, said HSE managers who claimed patients were suffering during the recent nurses' dispute now claimed no one was suffering as a result of the cutbacks, imposed to try to reduce the organisation's €245 million deficit.
The conference heard examples of how the ban on recruitment, imposed by the HSE earlier this month, as well as other cost-cutting measures devised by hospitals, were beginning to bite.
Liam Doran, the INO's general secretary, said four nurses due to travel to Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital in London next month to receive neonatal and intensive care training could not go as no one would replace them if they left. He said it had taken years to initiate the programme to address the shortage of specialist nurses here.
It was initiated following the death of two-year-old Róisín Ruddle in 2003 after her heart surgery was cancelled at Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin due to a shortage of intensive care nurses.
Joan Tobin, a nurse in Waterford, said there had been several cutbacks at Waterford Regional Hospital. An extra security guard, hired after a serious incident in which a nurse was threatened with a razor blade, was let go. The number of porters had been cut, the laundry service was "depleted" and 30 clerical staff were about to be let go.
The HSE claimed later that the laundry service at the hospital continued to operate as standard.
Therese Gallacher, a nurse in Donegal, said the HSE talked about employment ceilings, but there seemed to be no ceiling for managers. The number of grade eights working in the health service had increased, she said, from six in 2001 to 526 today.
The conference passed an emergency motion condemning the cutbacks and the recruitment ban, which it noted was introduced without consultation, and urged the HSE to exempt critical areas like A&E, cancer care, infection control and palliative care.
Judge Maureen Harding Clark is to be appointed to chair a commission to look at reducing nurses' working hours. The commission was promised as part of a framework to resolve the nurses' dispute earlier this year, when they were seeking better pay and a 35-hour week.