Debate contribution: Health and Social Care: Pay Awards
Debate contribution by Mr Robbie Butler on .
- MLA
- Mr Robbie Butler
- Party at the time
- Ulster Unionist Party
- Date
- 12 October 2026
- Type
- Debate contribution
- Business
- Oral Answers to Questions
- Heading
- Health and Social Care: Pay Awards
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5786339
Read the official Assembly record
Text
I absolutely agree. Thank you for your question and for the manner in which you put it. My 10 years of working in this place have been incredibly frustrating. What I do know is that, when parties in this place have been pressurised into finding agreement, it has been on the back of the pressure felt by Health and Social Care workers. We need only think back to COVID, when we clapped and gave them all a pat on the back. That appreciation was probably lost in the two most recent pay negotiations, because they quickly recognised that it is about politics in this place. It would be not regrettable but disgraceful if we were to lose the opportunity to show our Health and Social Care workers what they mean to us and to prioritise the transformation and reset that everyone in Northern Ireland so desperately deserves. This place's number-one function should be to make things better, and there is nothing more important than making someone's health better. We have plenty of pressures to face, plenty of inequalities to address and plenty of work to be getting on with, and it is about time that we started to get on with it.
202 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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