Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

May I ask a follow-up question on the issue of trust? We initially approached this with a view to flattening the curve. We accepted that it was going to spread through society but we hoped it would do so at a level that would not overwhelm our health service, which is more prone to being overwhelmed than those of other European states. We aimed to avoid scenes such as had been seen in the north of Italy and Madrid. We then moved towards a view that not everyone would get the virus and that we could protect everyone from it. We became more ambitious in our aims. In the view of the panel, does that shifting of the objective undermine trust? We had believed that everybody would come into contact with it. We did not aim for herd immunity but we believed that, sooner or later, everybody in the herd would come into contact with the disease, as they do with influenza or the common cold which, although I am not a scientist, I understand is a coronavirus.