Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Durkan. The Deputy's first question, understandably, relates to what happened in Kildare and the reason for so many cases so quickly. The advice I have is that it is a combination of factors, including high-risk workplaces in terms of Covid. That is the experience in Ireland. Nearly half of the workplace clusters to date, before this happened, had been in meat processing plants. That is the experience around the world. It is believed that travel may have played a part in terms of workers sharing commutes to and from work. It is believed accommodation also played a part in terms of congregated settings. When I ask the public health experts this question they are at pains to say that there are a lot of other unknown factors. For example, there may have been a super-spreader or several super-spreaders but they do not know that. I am sure the Deputy will agree with me that it is very important that in trying to identify what happened we do not lay blame anywhere.

The only thing to blame is a deadly virus and we are in the middle of a global pandemic.

Much good work was done in testing and tracing. The committee has done good work in this area in its earlier sessions. Due to the speed and significance of the number of additional cases in Kildare, Laois and Offaly, the tracing time slowed down. We need to ensure that it does not happen again. It happened for an understandable reason, namely that front-line clinicians were deployed back to their jobs. However, the tracing team is ramping up from about 50 or 60 around the time of the Kildare outbreaks to more than 150 by the end of the week. As the schools go back and we seriously ramp up testing for meat processing plants, direct provision, nursing homes, and as our community testing is now high, our priority must be to maintain very high turnaround times.