David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome all of our witnesses. I commend all of those on the front line in our healthcare services who are doing a Trojan job. I also commend those in the HSE who are rolling out the vaccine and wish everybody well. Best wishes to Dr. Woods and his team and Dr. Ronan Glynn and his team as well.

I appreciate the point that Dr. Glynn made that there may not be best value in looking back too much at this point because we have a very real crisis in the here and the now. Everybody accepts that. I am sure Dr. Glynn will also accept, however, that looking back is also important to learn lessons. We went from a situation before Christmas where we had some of the best data in the EU. We were one of the best performing countries in terms of having very low rates of transmission. Towards the end of December into early January, we went quickly to being one of the worst performing. As Dr. Glynn said, this involved record numbers that were not anticipated and numbers in the thousands every day which has resulted in transmission rates which are off the charts.

If I am to be blunt, we lost control of the virus. I have to ask whether losing control of the virus was as a result of a failure of public health advice that was given or a failure to act on public health advice. What Dr. Glynn said, and he is right, was that all of us need to follow the public health advice in the individual asks but we also need to stay at home. This is the best way to help those on the front line so we have fewer cases, less transmission of the virus and fewer hospitalisations. If that is the case now, surely it was the case before we lost control of the virus. My direct question is whether losing control of the virus was down to public health advice that failed or our failure, as politicians, to act on the health advice given.