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Agency workers such as cleaners, nurses and paramedics who work in public hospitals who were contracted or seconded to the HSE during the Covid-19 pandemic will receive the €1,000 bonus payment, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar has said.
However, the pandemic bonus will not be extended to carers and those in the private sector.
The Government hopes to issue the payment in February or March, and it will require legislation to be amended but this can be done “quite quickly”, Mr Varadkar said.
He said the once-off €1,000 tax free payment will be paid to over 100,000 frontline healthcare workers and that it was “very hard to know where to draw the lines on these things”.
Mr Varadkar said the criteria the Government applied in deciding who should receive the payment was those who worked in “clinical settings, wore masks and gowns every day, were employees of the State, were exposed to Covid patients every day, not just the risk of being exposed to something who might have Covid. . .and did so at a time when there were no vaccines”.
“That does include agency workers, if the agency was contracted by the HSE, so an agency nurse, an agency cleaner and agency paramedic, working side by side with their regular HSE employee is included in this,” he said.
“But where somebody worked for a private company, we’ll say a private hospital, a GP practice, a pharmacy or a private swap center – they’re not covered.
“There would have been very substantial fees paid to those businesses and companies for the work they did during the pandemic, many have already paid a bonus to their staff and can do so if they choose to.”
Mr Varadkar said further information on criteria for the payment will be provided on Thursday. He said the membership and terms of reference for a panel to examine the categories entitled to the payment has not yet been finalised but will be done “in the near future”.
Family carers
Mr Varadkar also said there was a difference between HSE and agency carers and family carers.
He said the Government wanted to amend rules to allow family carers avail of the State Contributory Pension. He said this would be the Government’s way of recognising family carers and that it would be “more valuable” to them financially than the bonus payment.
However, Sinn Féin deputy leader Pearse Doherty said there remains a “high level of ambiguity” about who exactly is going to receive the payment and that the Government “hasn’t been very clear about this over the last 24 hours”.
“The group of people who feel most let down by their omission so far is family carers,” the Donegal TD said.
He said their care is saving the State “hundreds of millions of euro every single year” and family carers would not experience the benefit of an additional public holiday as their role is 24/7.
While Sinn Féin TD Mairéad Farrell siad carers had been on the “very front line” during the Covid-19 pandemic and without their work, “the Government would have been in a real predicament”.
Ms Farrell said she was “at a loss” as to why carers had been excluded from the payment, some of whom had told her they were functioning on “almost no sleep” and a lack of access to services.
People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett said carers and retail workers in supermarkets should be considered for the bonus. He said those working in supermarkets “put themselves at very serious risk and literally kept us alive during the pandemic”.
Financial constraints
Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Michael McGrath said it is “simply not possible” to extend the pandemic bonus payment to other workers such as carers due to financial constraints.
Mr McGrath said if the Government was to extend the payment to other workers and volunteers, the cost could rise to “half a billion euro or more”.
“The truth is that if the Government were to seek to meet all of the legitimate calls that have been made to extend this pandemic payment, the cost of it would become very large.
“We would all love to extend this payment to a very wide range of workers and indeed volunteers, without whom our experience of Covid would even have been so much worse.”