Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Sorry. I thank the Deputy for that question. I will get Deputy Cullinane a detailed response as to the gap between the target and the full-time staff. The Deputy will forgive me, as I do not have the detail. It is not one of the topics that the committee asked us to discuss today and I do not have those exact figures in front of me. I understand the HSE is coming in next week and will have those details for the committee.

The testing and tracing system that has been put in place by the HSE has done extremely well and compares favourably by international standards. It is for another day. I note some of the highly critical remarks that the Deputy has made publicly about the HSE's testing and tracing system and I would respectfully suggest that they do not stand up. The Deputy's remarks are at odds with the facts. The HSE has not got it all right. It would not claim to have got it all right but under the circumstances, it has done a very good job. With respect, some of the criticism has been very unfair.

In good news, again, on testing and tracing, we have had a very significant increase in genome sequencing of positive tests. In fact, the numbers have gone from 1% of positive tests being genome sequenced to now 15%. We will be looking to increase that further within the realm of all of these new variants. That is why it is so important.

I would be delighted to come back to the committee in the near future and have a detailed conversation about rapid testing. It is something we discussed previously. I appointed an expert group to do a short piece of work on it. It is chaired by Professor Mark Ferguson, who is the Government's chief scientific adviser and the head of Science Foundation Ireland. They will be reporting back to me soon on that.

In terms of the regular testing and tracing, or polymerase chain reaction, PCR, testing, in response to Deputy Cullinane, the NPHET advice has been changing; for example, we are now going back to testing close contacts, and there is more NPHET advice coming on further improvements to the testing and tracing system.