They are recruiting nurses&midwives from outside the EU now and house them 2-3 people in one room to try to cover the extreme shortages. Low wages and the extreme prices mean nurses cant afford to live anymore.

Now I thought common opinion on this sub was its all not that bad? Housing isnt worse than in other places? Irish healthcare is grand? Young irish workers arent leaving the country?

18 comments

  1. You can look at my post history. I’ve talked about nursing in Ireland as someone who trained in another country and moved here. Nursing in this country is not worth it. And I flipping love being a nurse.

    Its well known in hospitals that the housing crisis is going to worsen the nursing shortage. An Indian girl I work with said Australia has been increasing their advertising for nurses and making it easier for them to move over with their families. She said a few of her friends have gone over already and it was much easier to secure housing and then bring their spouse than it was in Ireland. Another girl I work with has been in Ireland since the beginning of the year, and is still living in temporary accommodation. Every single rental she goes to view gets taken. Why would nurses want to come here when the government or hospitals can’t even bother looking after them?

    I’ve seen girls leave Ireland after their adaptation period but before their 2 year contract with the hospital is up just because they cannot find a home to bring their spouse/kids to and the separation is too much. Imagine moving to another country to better your family’s life, separating yourself from your children for months on end and only to discover you can’t find a house or an apartment to bring your children into. It’s horrible.

    Healthcare in Ireland is already in dire straights without the housing crisis. It’s very difficult to work here compared to other countries. Add the housing crisis, nobody is going to want to immigrate here to work. It’s only going to get worse.

  3. The sad thing is the government could easily just set caps for rental prices and combat the issue.

    Or increase taxes on wealthy property owners. If the country cant retain essential workers then people need to help out. Divide the burden instead of leaving everything to people renting. Those nurses from india only get that accommodation in training for 6 months, after that they need to sort things out themselves

  4. [This article only gets increasingly relevant](https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/)

    The media will focus on jobs like Nurse, Garda, Teacher. They’re public service jobs, people understand why they’re important and what they do, and it’s easier to get information about them going unfilled and so on because you can put in an FOI request to public bodies.

    Everyone, though, should see this only as the canary in the coal mine. The nurses and teachers we’re missing aren’t those at mid and end career (20-40 years service), they are the graduates and young professionals who don’t own homes and are on the lower end of the salary scale.

    They are, if you look at their education, and age profile, the same type of people as are going for private sector grad programmes in other fields. The terms and conditions aren’t dissimilar to other grad jobs (although slightly better than some, and considerably worse than others).

    So if we’re missing nurses and teachers, we’ll hear about it. Increasing waiting lists, class sizes, etc. coupled with FOIs that will show senior mangers complaining about hiring difficulties.

    However if we’re missing the private sector jobs that, ultimately, *fund* those public sector roles in services we all need, then **we won’t hear about it.** To some degree it’s the Carbon Monoxide leak you don’t know is there until it’s too late – unless you pay attention to the canary.

    Layoffs are obvious, but a lagging indicator of problems and can be caused by many other issues (as we now see with the deflation of the tech bubble). Investment that doesn’t happen in Ireland because companies have difficulties hiring at the price they expect to pay is almost invisible until well after the fact. Nobody notices the HQ of some firm that isn’t there, they just notice the drop in investment over a number of years in some graph 4 years hence when the trend becomes apparent.

    Ireland’s growth has been a good thing, much as people might disagree about the finer points of it, and has allowed people to build homes and lives here instead of emigrating while increasing the standard of living immeasurably in a couple of generations. To continue to have that prosperity we do need global investment (or [develop a domestic capital base, which will still require investment to get started](https://thecurrency.news/articles/99356/stephen-kinsella-four-steps-to-make-ireland-a-leader-in-offshore-wind/)). If that falls off, simply to enrich land owners who are pure rent seekers adding no economic value, then that’s a profound failure of government and and a failure of the public to recognise what’s going on.

  6. No shit.

    Imagine working your bollocks off on the hospital frontlines during COVID only to have to trudge home every day to a house share with 7 or 8 other people that you have to spend half of your months wages for the privilege of.

    All the while seeing on the news politicians slapping themselves on the back for talking about how important you are and trying on the sky to steal some of the respect you’re held in by the population for themselves for talking about how important you are.

    Ask about getting paid better though and you’re given a big spiel that amounts to fuck all.

    I don’t blame the nurses for feeling like it’s just pointless at the moment and looking abroad for better opportunities.

  7. What’s required is to make sure wealthy/well-off/politicians have to use the same health services the public use.

    End politicians ability to use private health services, and this gets fixed in no-time. Same for many public services.

  9. Although this is obviously true to an extent, I’m always very slow to trust the INMO.

    Why?

    Working in hospitals is *awful*. Irish doctors and nurses have been going abroad in huge numbers for at least twenty years or so now because of how awful the conditions are.

    Everytime the INMO speak, they want more money. They never seem to be shouting “let’s hire more nurses to reduce the workload and improve conditions” it’s always about how money is the solution to the HSE’s problems.

    Moreover “retention” is a very vague issue. Retention of whom, exactly? Is it senior nurses? Junior nurses? Why would a payrise for senior nurses improve retention of junior nurses?

  10. We’re regressing towards feudalism. Go to work solely to pay rent and eat. Even after that not enough to heat the place properly. And for the thousands you fork out to fat cat landlords, you won’t even have the pleasure of a nice gaff, it’ll be a tiny room in a former 4 bed now subdivided into a dozen dormitories. No money to go out and meet people, no way to get a mortgage and end the renting hell without a spouse. Unable to retire and drop dead on the job.

    Few years ago that would have seemed too far fetched to me. Now, if we don’t make drastic changes I’m positive it’s exactly what will happen in my lifetime.

  11. Common opinion on this sub = the opinions of the same 20 tech people that sit in the sub all day long. They have no idea what the real world is like and seem to be experts on every subject. Do yourself a favour and block them.

  12. I really don’t get why media focuses on sectors specifically..

    I’ve seen it with teachers and now nurses…”teachers turning down Dublin jobs because they can’t afford rent in Dublin”

    It’s the same for every sector. A grad engineer earning 25/30k doesn’t find it easier to rent in Dublin than a teacher on 35k.

    Maybe these journos should go and do their job and find things out rather than letting unions and co write articles for them?

  13. Queue the time honoured “but we’re one of the richest and best places to live in the world”.

    Stop complaining you pleb….

  14. Because a certain group of people here on this sub and as an extension the general public, live in their own perfect bubble. These are people who either take this as a matter of false national pride (how dare you say Ireland is worse), or aren’t really affected by the issues cause they have a house already in a suburb probably funded my dad and mom’s bank, drive in a car everywhere and have private healthcare cover. Living in denial works for them.

  15. And doctors. St Vincent’s in D4 struggling to get doctors as it’s hard to get reasonable accommodation and parking is non existent. It’s also not the handiest to get to by public transport.

  16. I saw a billboard about a month ago from the Australian health service advertising openings.
    I consider it a pretty scathing indictment of the government.

  17. I don’t know what you’re on about. Vast majority of the people here believe we have a severe housing crisis.

  18. Nurses get absolutely shafted in this country.

    Junior Doctors too, but at least they have a light at the end of the tunnel.

    We gave them a €1k bonus after all the trauma they went through over covid, says it all really

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