The Health Minister says the government is working to roll out the Pandemic Recognition Payment for frontline workers as quickly as possible.
Minister Stephen Donnelly was speaking at St Finbarr’s Hospital in Douglas today where he admitted the plan to get the money into people’s accounts has taken far longer than originally expected.
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation today called on the Minister to cut the “red tape” around the payment and said the delayed implementation of agreements such as the bonus is one of the reasons why nurses are leaving Irish Hospitals to work elsewhere.
It was announced in January that frontline workers would be paid the €1,000 tax-free bonus.
Speaking to RedFM News, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly outlines why the payments have taken so long to process:
"There was a lot of engagement between the representative bodies for the workers and the HSE, in terms of different groups of people. So for example, some are very straightforward: the people who are directly employed in the hospitals. I wanted to make sure, for example, that people working as cleaners in hospitals who we may not directly employ: people working in catering and hospitals, people working in other patient facing roles; that they too got the payment. So there has been a lot of technical work. I think it's taken longer than any than any of us would want. But the reason is to make sure that we get the money out to all those groups of people".
