Midwives and nurses march against €50 fee increase

A campaign to reverse the €50 hike in registration fees for nurses and midwives led to several protests around the country yesterday, including at the gates of Cork University Hospital.

The protests come ahead of a rally planned by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, the Psychiatric Nurses Association and Siptu, to place in Dublin on November 18.

Emma Murphy, a staff nurse at CUH, said nurses were angry that they were expected to pay more to register at a time when they believe their regulatory body, the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland, is not being transparent about how their money is spent.

“They haven’t published their accounts for the past two years,” said Ms Murphy. “They got a one-off €1.6m grant from the department of health last year and they bought a new premises for €4.9m a couple of years ago. There are 60,000 registered nurses and that’s a big increase particularly when our wages have decreased by 15%.”

INMO spokesman Michael Dineen said the union was concerned that there were “an awful lot of unanswered questions as to how the money collected from nurses and midwives is being spent”.

“For instance, when a nurse appears before a fitness-to-practice hearing, the NMBI regularly has a senior counsel, junior counsel, and a solicitor,” said Mr Dineen. “Their legal representation seems excessive on a lot of occasions. We’d like greater transparency around the legal costs.”

Mr Dineen said nurses also felt they should not be the sole funders of the inquiries, given that there was a public interest element to them as well. He said the registration fee had risen from €80 two years ago, to €150, while teachers paid a registration fee of just €65. The INMO is encouraging nurses to cancel their direct debits to the NMBI and to attend the rally in Dublin outside the NMBI headquarters in Careysfort, Blackrock, next month.

A spokesman for the NMBI said it had a statutory obligation to be self-financing under the Nursing and Midwifery Act 2011. He said the board had voted reluctantly to hike the fee in September because it had no other option if it was to generate its own income to meet its statutory requirements. Nurses who do not pay the fee run the risk of having their names removed from the register.

The spokesman also said the board’s financial statements for 2012 and 2013 will be published in November or December once it is signed off by the Comptroller and Auditor General.