John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and thank him for giving his time to the committee. I pay tribute also to the Ministers of State, Deputies Rabbitte and Butler, who have been available at any hour of the day or night over the last six or seven months to answer myriad questions, and to the Minister of State, Deputy Feighan, who is also very obliging.

I want to pay tribute to the Minister's temperament during what he has described as – I know it is a cliché – the tsunami of issues and events, the ups and the downs, that face him as Minister. I want to acknowledge the courteous and mild-mannered way he has dealt with everything. I also welcome the opportunity we get in the committee to tease things out in a little more detail with him, and not in the combative way that is so typical of the Dáil Chamber, even in the Convention Centre.

I want to echo the comments made in regard to the student nurses. I made those points in a parliamentary party meeting and the Minister is familiar with them. I welcome the comments the Minister has made here so I do not need a response from him. However, I ask him to always bear in mind that this cohort of student nurses, as I know he knows, never envisaged what they would be thrown into. Without them, the health system, particularly in regard to Covid, while it would not have collapsed, would certainly have had its foundations seriously shaken. I ask the Minister to take into account the uniqueness of the circumstances they have faced and how they have risen to the challenge. The Minister does not need to come back on that.

I also thank the Minister's officials and the HSE. These are unprecedented times and this is an invisible virus, although we often lose sight of that in the midst of our own anger, frustration, anxiety, despair and distress. When we do not have an outlet at which to direct those feelings, obviously, they get directed at the person who politically carries the can, and that is just part of the job description, I guess.

I want to ask about the national immunisation advisory committee, NIAC, review. A different cohort of people contact politicians every day and we are told, for example, that we dealt with the kidney transplant people and those on dialysis as a result of public representations, which was welcome. However, each week is going to see new cohorts of people and these have started to come into our inboxes in the last few days, suggesting that different categories need to be prioritised. Is the recent NIAC review the end of that process? Is it the objective that abundant supply, beginning to arrive from early April, will begin to handle all of the other groups?