Varadkar to announce campaign to bring Irish nurses home

A recruitment campaign targeted at Irish nurses working in the UK is to get underway in four British cities next month.

Nurses applying to work in the Irish health system will get incremental credit for their years working in the UK, in a clear attempt to attract qualified staff back to the country.

The recruitment drive, details of which will be given by Minister for Health Leo Varadkar at the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) annual conference today, is urgently needs to plug skills shortages in many parts of the health service.

The campaign is expected to make use of social media and newspapers to target Irish nurses and their families in relation to job opportunities in the HSE.

Nurses in the UK will be able to do an on-the-spot interview at one of seven recruitment centres and the campaign will target areas with a high density of Irish nurses.

Failed scheme

Mr Varadkar is also expected to announce shortly a replacement for the failed graduate nurse scheme.

This scheme, which involved graduate nurses being paid less in their first years of work, has been quietly shelved after three years of resistance by the INMO.

Although no formal announcement has been made, the scheme has been allowed to “fizzle out”, one source acknowledged.

Launched by former Minister for Health James Reilly in 2012, the scheme originally provided for 1,000 places to be filled by newly qualified nurses.

However, following the INMO boycott, it never managed to fill more than half the available places.

Speakers at the INMO conference in Trim, Co Meath, hailed the shelving of the “flawed and demeaning” graduate programme, under which student nurses were paid 20 per cent less than their colleagues for up to three years.

Initially, new graduates were paid €22,000 in the first 12 months under the scheme, compared to the regular starting wage of €26,000.

The scheme has been blamed for driving young nurses out of the State and into health services in the UK and Australia, where pay and conditions are considerably better.

Gobnait Magner, from Cork, described the scheme as "damaging, insulting and denigrating" and said Ireland was "educating nurses for emigration".

Skilled and experienced nurses were “haemorrhaging” from the health system and “like was not being replaced with like”, she said.

Pay restoration

Nurses expect a clear timetable for full pay restoration, INMO president Claire Mahon also told the conference.

“The Government showed no patience, no understanding and no awareness when, on three separate occasions over a five-year period, it demanded immediate, draconian cuts in the pay and conditions of nurses and midwives and other public servants.”

She said nurses had suffered a 7 per cent pay cut, a 7 per cent pension levy and cuts to shift pay equivalent to 2 per cent of pay. The Government must immediately move to restore the time and one-sixth premium for working between 6-8pm.

“In addition to our money back, we also want and will not rest until we get a 37-hour week like everyone else.”

Are you an Irish nurse working abroad? Would you consider returning to work in Ireland? Let us know in the comments section below.