Mr. Liam Herrick:

On behalf of the ICCL, we deeply appreciate all the comments of the members of the committee. What they had to say demonstrates a great deal of common purpose. There is a strong commitment on their part to the protection of human rights. We all want to achieve the same thing. Many of the difficulties we have had during the past year have been due to the pressure of time in dealing with an emergency, but we have an opportunity now to move beyond that. We will have further challenges in the coming months. We want to achieve the strongest possible public support for the vaccination programme in particular. Ireland could be heading towards having as high an acceptance rate of the vaccination programme as 90%, one of the highest in the world, which shows the people are behind the public health effort. On the other side of the ledger, we should be returning to normal democratic rights, removing emergency temporary ministerial processes and particularly emergency laws that take away the rights of the most vulnerable people in our community such as those suffering with mental ill health. We should be reintroducing parliamentary democracy to the fullest possible extent. There is common purpose here. The Oireachtas has spoken very loudly about this both in terms of the Seanad debate yesterday and this debate today. I hope that the Dáil will do so in the coming days. We very much hope the Minister for Health shows a willingness and openness to have stronger safeguard protections, which, as the Chairman said, would bring the people along with us. We believe there is an opportunity to do that. The fact that the Minister is already moving to suggest some amendments is a positive sign. We hope there is scope for more movement during the course of the rest of the debates.