Over the last year the Labour Party has called for the government to put in place more supports for our frontline healthcare workers.

The failure to pay our student nurses and midwives is shameful and a disgrace, and something we’ve campaigned on for the last year. The huge risks faced by students must be reflected in how we treat them.

Many student nurses need to work part time in order to fund their unpaid placement. The fact that student nurses are not getting paid on the frontline to take care of very sick and vulnerable people during this global pandemic is unacceptable.

That is why the Labour Party have proposed a new law in the Seanad so that student nurses and midwives would be paid a wage in line with that of healthcare assistants. This is what student nurses were paid in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.