Tánaiste Simon Coveney has confirmed that the Government is taking legal advice as to how sanctions may be used against striking nurses, including docking their pay.
Mr Coveney said the Government does not want to be at odds with nurses but called on unions to live up to their part of the national pay agreement.
“They are great people, doing very difficult work, often in very pressurised circumstances. We want to be working with nurses, with the INMO and with the psychiatric nurses to build a better health service that can attract many young people into this profession,” he said.
“What the Government has said is that we are taking legal advice in regard to the options that are available to us, consistent with the pay agreement that everybody signed up to with their eyes open,” he told the Dáil.
There is a responsibility on the Government to deliver on that, and that involves hundreds of millions of euro of extra pay across the public sector. There i
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