Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I beg the Chairman's pardon and thank him.

I thank Dr. Nabarro for his time. This has been an enlightening session. I would like to ask three questions, the first of which relates to the gender impact of Covid-19. We know it has been much more fatal for men as 38% of deaths globally have been women. However, the rate in Ireland is 57% so we have a massive additional fatality rate for women. Can he provide an insight into why that has happened? Are there structural changes we can make to combat this issue?

The second issue is border controls. Dr. Nabarro referenced the letter signed by 1,000 scientists who made a very strong case for increased border controls. There are other groups in this country, for example in hospitality, business and other areas, who are very understandably looking for looser border controls. What would Dr. Nabarro advise the Irish Government to do for the next three months? Would he advise mandatory rapid testing in airports, mandatory self-isolation or a relaxing of the self-isolation rules? Would he pick a small number of countries and have an air bridge with them? Obviously, as an island nation, getting the border controls right is very important.

Finally, there has been a discussion this morning about the fatality rate in Ireland versus other countries. Dr. Nabarro quite rightly said that Ireland has done a lot of things right. It moved quickly on a lot of issues. When one considers our Covid fatality rate, one sees that although we have fared considerably better than some countries like the UK, France and Italy, we have fared significantly worse than many other European countries like Germany, Austria, Finland, Greece and Portugal. Given that we appear to have done a lot of things right, as we plan for a second wave that we hope will not come what can we learn from the European countries that seem to have fared significantly better than we have?