Civil Servant Covid Recognition

Are you comparing someone who works in retail vs someone who has another person health and potentially life in their hands? With full on human contact and a potential to catch covid much easier. Then the abhorrent hours that nurses have worked over the pandemic coupled with the emotional impact of watching many people die and dealing with their respective families?

Yeah. Woe is me is really the right attitude here.

(I am in no way belittling the fantastic work done by retailers which have shown just how important they are over the preceding 18 months)

Nurses are not civil servants, they are public servants.

What I don't get is, if healthcare staff were responsible for bringing the virus into hosps and nursing homes, why would we reward them?

If people had been reasonably happy with our health service pre Covid I think many would support the idea of bonuses for healthcare staff. Unfortunately, our health and social care were a sh*tshow before Covid. Talk of bonuses costing 350 million -1 billion will infuriate people and will spark off a deluge of Whatabouts, many of them valid.

For instance, what about elderly and disabled people and their unpaid family carers living in the community who were terribly affected by the pandemic. Services such as day care, meals on wheels and homecare were withdrawn with families having to step in. Community physiotherapists were redeployed to other duties. Vulnerable people were advised to "cocoon" and to talk to the local GAA club to get food shopping. People couldn't visit their relatives in nursing homes and were rightly trying to keep relatives at home and out of nursing homes and hospitals at all costs. Then when the vaccine rollout started, unlike in the UK, family carers received no recognition whatsoever.

I complained to the HSE about the services that weren't provided during the pandemic. The person I spoke to admitted that there was chaos and they had great difficulty getting some staff to do anything where they might come into contact with another human being as they were so fearful of Covid. And now everyone may get a bonus for "putting their lives on the line"?

You'd begrudge Christ a half an hour off the cross.

A concentrated mass of illness vs a supermarket are two completely different things. This whataboutery has nothing to do with the fact that nurses were very much at the frontline of it all. Why don't they deserve to get a bonus? If you're in the army you get danger pay if you are going above and beyond the call of duty why would you not be paid?

The conditions were stretched in hospitals or have we all forgot about the PPE, ventilator crisis and ICU crisis all occurring. Hospital staff went above and beyond to adapt and make do. Doing a job would entail being able to do it with the proper supplies, facilities etc. Many nurses quit over these very conditions. Those that didn't got on with it.

What is even the debate here? Everyone who had to work in the pandemic with masses of the public under risky conditions deserves bonuses and some form of appreciation. But somehow comparing an area of concentrated covid infections (a hospital) versus a retail store, does not hold weight. Nurses should rightly be considered first and if you have looked at any developments there is talk of extending that out to other key workers.

"Just doing their job" I have never heard anything more condescending and snide recently than that.

Looking forward to getting my 10 days off. I don't mind Michael McGrath TD taking my 5 off over the next two years.

Thanks 👍