Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I do not believe anyone can accurately say right now what will happen in September. If things go according to plan, both in terms of the suppression of the virus and the vaccine roll-out, and what is increasingly positive information about the effectiveness of these vaccines, we would certainly be in a very different and much better place next September. There is no question about that. However, we have to temper all of that with the fact that there are many unknowns and variations. There are variants emerging now around the world. They are being studied very rapidly. The characteristics they will have in terms of increased transmissibility, increased severity, resistance to the vaccines is largely unknown. For example, information emerged yesterday and today around initial looks at one of the variants that originated in South America in terms of effectiveness of vaccines, higher transmissibility and so forth. All I can say is that if the vaccines arrive in Ireland to the agreed supplies and if the rest of the vaccines are authorised, by September the population would be largely vaccinated. If we add to that the fact that these vaccines appear to be highly effective and way beyond the sort of protection we get from the influenza vaccine and if there were not variants arriving that had immunity or whatever the correct scientific word is that could evade these vaccines, we would be in a much more positive space in September.