Ambulance staff to hold further 24-hour strike in July

Ambulance staff are to hold a further 24-hour strike later this month as part of their long-running campaign over trade union representation rights.

Members of the National Ambulance Service Representative Association (Nasra), which is a branch of the Psychiatric Nurses Association (PNA) are also to stage a rally at Leinster House on Thursday lunchtime.

The PNA said about 500 Nasra branch members (including paramedics, advanced paramedics and emergency medical technicians) would go on strike from 7 am on Friday, July 19th to 7 am on Saturday, July 20th .

PNA general secretary Peter Hughes said on Wednesday: “The message is unchanged – ambulance personnel, who established their own branch within the PNA ten years ago, demand the right to be members of PNA as the union of their choice and will not be forced by the HSE to join another union that they do not want to be members of. While our campaign has been encouraged by the growing level of political support in Leinster House, we are calling on all Oireachtas members to support ambulance personnel in demanding a basic right for workers to join the union of their choice.”

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“It is a disgrace that ambulance personnel are being forced by the HSE to hold another 24 hour strike in a vital front line emergency service. This is a situation that these professional, highly dedicated workers have said they do not want to be in. However, they are left with no option in the face of an inexplicable intransigence by the HSE and a refusal to acknowledge the clearly expressed wishes of ambulance personnel to be members of, and represented by PNA – a trade union of over 49 years’ experience in representing workers within the health and social care services”

The HSE does not recognise the PNA or its Nasra branch as a representative body for ambulance personnel.

The HSE has said ambulance personnel are well represented by a number of other unions through agreed industrial relations processes.