Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate that, and it is a fair point, but the fact that we have multiples of the overall fatality rate definitively proves that other countries had much lower mortality rates in nursing homes. The statement from Dr. Nabarro to which Mr. Breslin referred was made in response to a question from me. I put that question and he answered in that way because we did not have The Sunday Business Post analysis at that time. He referred to the response to date, which has been that the data is not comparable. The reason The Sunday Business Postanalysis on excess deaths is so important is because it moves beyond Dr. Nabarro's point and states we do now have comparable data. It is not just The Sunday Business Postanalysis. We have had statisticians and mathematicians look at the data and say this is the right way to go.

I thank Mr. Breslin for his answer. I believe one of the reasons that not everything was done in nursing homes that could have been done was that the sector did not have a voice. I have listened to Mr. Breslin, Mr. Reid and others and read through all the correspondence provided. I appreciate there was engagement. I know Mr. Breslin, Mr. Reid and their staff were engaging because I have read through the multitude of emails. What I do not understand is why that engagement did not turn into action. The first time NPHET mentioned nursing homes was on 10 March when it told nursing homes to remove the visitor restrictions that had been put in place. The Government's national Covid-19 response was published on 16 March. It is a detailed document but it mentions nursing homes just once, and only in the context of being somewhere to discharge acute patients to.

We have the protocols now that show patients were discharged from nursing homes to hospitals with Covid outbreaks and the patients were not tested. The protocols also show that even if the patient was a defined close contact of a Covid case in a hospital where there was an outbreak, he or she still were not tested. The nursing homes wrote immediately saying they were not comfortable with this and that all these patients need to be isolated in the hospitals for two weeks. None of these things seemed to happen. While I accept that there was engagement, why does Mr. Breslin think that at NPHET and in the Government strategy that was published, there was so little action until close to the end of March, when the nursing homes were clearly raising a growing crisis much earlier than that?