Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Chairman is very kind and has been very fair. I want to back up Deputy McGuinness in what he has said. The fact is that there is a person in my constituency who has cancer and who had a procedure cancelled two weeks ago. He and his consultant are both at home and there is nobody in the operating theatre where this procedure could have been done. That is not acceptable. It is hugely important that, whatever else we do, we ensure that people who had operations and procedures booked and were expecting them to take place have those proceeded with.

The other point I want to ask the HSE, and I want to say very clearly that there is great support for the fantastic work that it has done, is regarding the concerns for the future if Covid-19 comes back. What additional actions can or will the HSE carry out to ensure that the nursing home deaths are not as high as they currently are? While I accept and I said earlier that we know that older people are very vulnerable, particularly people in nursing homes, a nightmare scenario happened in a nursing home in my own constituency of County Louth, where there were more than 80 patients and there have been 22-23 deaths now.

Some 60% of the staff were sick and could not come in. Where there were 24 nurses at one stage, there were later just six trying to look after all the patients. It is an impossible task.

When did Mr. Reid first decide to intervene in the nursing home sector? I would like to know. I am not being critical or negative. We need to know when the requests came in for PPE from around the country. What was going on at the HSE's senior administrative level? When did it make the decision to intervene? I want to repeat publicly that the head of primary care in CHO 8 was exceptionally helpful when I made the case to him about the home to which I refer. There was a significant and immediate intervention. I do not know what went on with the complaints which we read in the national press about PPE not being supplied to private nursing homes. It was on Facebook pages. I received questions about why a nursing home was not getting PPE. The HSE told me clearly that if a request was made, nursing homes would get PPE immediately. There is a significant amount that we do not know, and we need to know more. The best way forward is to plan for the future as "Team Ireland", with the HSE, Nursing Homes Ireland and all the other agencies working together on a plan for the winter. We can only base that on the knowledge of what happened in the past, when the HSE knew and when it acted.