Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I had a technological battle this morning whereby the system decided to change my passwords, which made it very difficult to get reorganised. I apologise for missing the original presentations.

To begin in the political arena, I disagree with a point made by Deputy Gino Kenny, although normally I agree with much of what he has to say. We need to recognise one matter. We are not unique in the globe in having a serious problem with this virus. Throughout the world at present, an emergency battle is taking place. There has been surge after surge, and some of the countries that at the beginning were the leading lights in this area fell down, as we did too. It is not fair, therefore, to say the system or the people involved in the system have failed or that we are worse or better than anybody else. This is a battle that has to continue.

To be fair to the front-line workers, they have put their lives at risk and continue to do so. Many of them have lost their lives in the course of their duty to the system. We need to recognise that and to recognise that when we criticise the system, we may be criticising them indirectly and that is not fair.

At what stage can we expect the level of vaccination to move from 20%, to 30%, to 40% and so on? To what extent has it been calculated the degree to which the rate of infection is likely to drop in line with that, proportionately? It would be helpful if we had some figures on that because at least we would have something to look forward to.

We have all received emails, including in the past week, from allegedly well-informed personaeto the effect that there is no virus at all and that this is a figment of the imagination of some very creative people.

There are many pages of this. It is doing terrible damage. It is doing damage and is disheartening for the people who are providing front-line services. We must all cop onto ourselves. In case anybody doubts, there are people who have made huge sacrifices in terms of de-congregation, avoiding meetings in the home and so-----