National Economic and Social Council Dail Éireann — 2023-12-06 ============================================================ Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire At the end of last year, NESC produced a report on improving industrial relations. I suggest that NESC was absolutely right to focus on this subject when we consider that Fórsa has demonstrations today outside hospitals because of the really outrageous fact that a recruitment embargo has been imposed across our health service. Fórsa points out that due to this recruitment pause, there will be a serious impact on services. It also states that there will be a massive increase of pressure on staff, which will lead people to leave the health service when we are chronically short of staff, and that there is a massive over-reliance on outsourcing to agency workers and to private external consultants, all of which costs more in the end and causes services to come under pressure. I suggest we listen to the Fórsa workers, engage with them, and lift this crazy recruitment embargo----- --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-12-06/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:30+00:00 Sitting date: 2023-12-06