Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for all their work. Undoubtedly it has been a pressured time for them and their colleagues. I am a big supporter of science. Will the witnesses comment on one lesson from all of this, which is the need to invest more in scientific research in this area? Do they feel that the level of Government investment in that area is satisfactory?

The issue of transparency and the governance in our response to Covid-19 is important. Right from the beginning we have been told we were being led by science and I want to dig into that a little bit. Since early March I have asked for the minutes of the expert advisory group to be published, along with the group's recommendations and advices to NPHET. To date, and only as of last week, we got the first two months of those minutes but with none of the recommendations or advices. We are two months behind on the publication of the expert advisory group's minutes and there are no recommendations or advices. This is important with regard to the past and the present. We want to hear, and I certainly want to hear, what the scientists are saying to NPHET, and then evaluate the decisions that are made by NPHET and the Government on the scientific advice. I believe there is a lack of transparency in that. Will the representatives explain why the minutes, with the advices and recommendations, are way behind or are not being delivered at all?

When I looked at the two months of minutes, three of them were significantly redacted. I do not have the time to go into the instances in great detail, but I do not see why they have been redacted. In the minutes of 25 March 2020, for example, under the heading "Mask use by healthcare workers in clinical areas", there are comments from some people asking if something can be recommended if the supplies are not there. Other comments acknowledge that this is happening in other hospitals too. We, however, do not know what is being referred to because the critical section is redacted. It clearly relates to personal protective equipment, PPE, health workers and exposure to Covid-19. Why would that be redacted? Who redacted it? When one considers the high level of infection rates among healthcare workers, which seemed to be significantly high, perhaps the witnesses will comment on this. A lot of the advisory group's deliberations in the published minutes focus on the issue of the exposure of healthcare workers, testing of healthcare workers, PPE for healthcare workers, self-isolation of healthcare workers who have been exposed, and so on. Why would these issues be redacted when they are so terribly important?

I will give another example. On 18 March 2020, a report to the expert advisory group showed that 7% of cases could be accounted for by asymptomatic transmission, and there was a recommendation from one meeting that passengers coming from northern Italy should be quarantined for two weeks. At the meeting it was said that this suggestion would be relayed to NPHET. It was not. From what I can see, because we have not received the recommendations or advices, it was never relayed to NPHET and it does not appear again at the next NPHET meeting. Why the secrecy around the deliberations of the scientists and experts? Why is there a delay? Why are there redactions if transparency should be key?