Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Chairman is absolutely right that I have mentioned a tipping point several times. It is not me making that up. I am saying it because that is NPHET's position. It is natural that we all become fatigued with this. People have been through an awful lot. The reason I am emphasising and re-emphasising it is that we need to be on our guard. In terms of the Chairman's question about whether lockdowns work, we know they work. We did one here and it worked. They did them across Europe and they worked. If the purpose is to flatten the curve, we locked the country down and the curve was flattened. That has been the experience of most of the countries we have looked at.