Covid-19 pandemic bonus payments further delayed for non-HSE frontline staff

State officials have been forced to hire a contractor to help pay healthcare workers still awaiting a €1,000 Covid-19 pandemic bonus more than nine months after it was promised by Government.

The tax-free payment for frontline staff was announced in January in recognition of their work during the crisis, but thousands still have not been paid. Among them are nursing home and hospice workers, agency staff, employees in long-term residential care facilities, home carers, members of the Defence Forces redeployed to frontline Covid-19 work for the Health Service Executive and Dublin Fire Brigade paramedics.

The HSE has sought a third-party contractor to assist with payments to workers in these groups, excluding Defence Forces staff and Dublin Fire Brigade paramedics, but the deadline for applications for the contract fell last Friday, further delaying the payments.

The Department of Health has said that 121,487 workers have received bonuses, including 85,012 HSE staff and 36,475 at State-funded section 38 organisations, whose staff are considered public service workers. Staff at section 39 organisations, grant-funded to work for the HSE have not been paid.

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‘Battle’ for payment

Trade unions and industry groups representing unpaid workers have criticised the delays. The Irish Nurses’ and Midwives’ Organisation said unions wrote to Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly last Friday urgently seeking details of when their remaining members would be paid.

Ashley Connolly, an official at the State’s second-largest trade union, Fórsa, said the payment was intended as special recognition but it had become “a battle to ensure it is paid”.

Tadhg Daly, chief executive of Nursing Homes Ireland, the representative group for private nursing homes, said paying a contractor would cost the State more money and further delay the payments. Making some workers join a queue was “disrespectful”, he said.

The department said that once the third-party contractor was signed up, information would be published shortly thereafter to facilitate applications and payments. “Once this process is in place, the department is keen that payments to eligible workers will be made as soon as possible thereafter,” a spokesman said.

Julie McNeela, a manager at Aras Mhuire nursing facility in Drogheda, Co Louth, said the delays were demoralising for staff who would be asked to deal with Covid-19 cases this winter. “It is like we don’t exist. Staff feel the Government don’t give two hoots.”