Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Nurses and others who worked through this pandemic deserve better

Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, holds his ministerial 'Red Box' outside 11 Downing Street, London, before delivering his Budget last week. Picture: Victoria Jones/PA Wire.
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, holds his ministerial 'Red Box' outside 11 Downing Street, London, before delivering his Budget last week. Picture: Victoria Jones/PA Wire. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, holds his ministerial 'Red Box' outside 11 Downing Street, London, before delivering his Budget last week. Picture: Victoria Jones/PA Wire.

Extremely rich Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced his budget with typical assurance. Other aspects of his budget were almost as offensive but that 1 per cent extra pay for nurses stood out. ‘Our’ gratitude last year to those on the pandemic frontline, the low-paid in so many jobs, that editorialising about how they must now be acknowledged financially?

Instead a Royal College of Nurses report says health workers are given personal protective equipment (PPE) that is ‘fundamentally flawed’, masks that don’t protect and that research showing this has been repeatedly ignored. The Department of Health and Social Care in London insisted PPE recommendations were updated this January, ‘agreed by an expert group of clinicians and scientists from all four UK nations based on clinical evidence.’

That means, surely, that evidence was presented from Northern Ireland, it being one of the UK’s notional ‘four nations’. Are the NI clinicians and scientists happy to stand over this?

When infection rates were at their worst if you developed symptoms and could stay away from work without losing your job and your household going hungry, if you had space where you lived to ‘self-isolate’, you know you are a lucky citizen, maybe a privileged one. If nobody belonging to you is in a home with an endangered, overworked and painfully underpaid staff, it is easier not to think about those at risk. Looking back on it, clapping for the health service was a bad joke.

There is something familiar about what perhaps can be called the backwash of crisis. It happens in families after a long illness, a painful divorce, when someone leaves and tension lifts like magic. The worst may be over. Human nature plus spring calls ‘move on’. Big business is a cooler beast.

The Bank of Ireland smacked its staff in the face first thing on Monday last week by announcing a cull of 103 branches to cut costs, citing increased use of digital banking in the past year, lower footfall. Staff unions called this shameful, cruel to people with no internet access, literacy problems, the elderly, Sinn Féin and Labour in Dublin joining them in demanding it be reversed. But coolly ‘noting’ the decision the Department of Finance called it ‘ultimately a commercial matter and solely the responsibility of the Board and management.’

Not at all coolly Labour's Finance spokesperson Ged Nash said the bank was exploiting the Covid crisis. Tone deaf, said Sinn Féin's Pearse Doherty, insisting on the Minister for Finance’s responsibility as one of the bank’s largest shareholders.

In the north 15 of the 28 branches are to go. Nothing will happen for about three months, allegedly, with no compulsory redundancies. But 120 staff don’t know where they will be working or how. From home? In branches awkward to get to? Doing what? Almost certainly impersonal, mechanistic drudgery online, the sort their jobs began to dwindle into years back, as ATMs took over inside as well as out and ‘counter service’ became a hard to access luxury.

Dismay is plain if you look in the face of one of those masked, polite people who have worked through the past year knowing worse changes hung in the air. What kept some halfway satisfied was that even behind new screens and more machines they stayed a part of neighbourhoods, small towns, cities.

In the bank down our street, a knowledgeable woman for almost 30 years has dealt equally courteously with the near-skint and the minted. Last Friday a crisis about transferring cash shamefully preoccupied this writer - until the arrival of an older customer, the worker’s heartfelt thanks to her ‘for the lovely card’. Then at last, although professionalism kept her advice on track the strained eyes became obvious above the mask.

Bank workers are less dramatic pandemic casualties. Like shop-workers, carers, cleaners and the health service, they too stayed at work through the worst times. They also deserve better.