Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their attendance today. I am conscious of the fact that Dr. Holohan and Dr. De Gascun were with us on 2 November last. At that time, we had no testing - either PCR or antigen testing - but we had a very similar conversation about the need for validation, the importance of validation and real-world testing. In the meantime, a number of reports have been published. We had one in October and two more in April from HIQA. We had a report from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, ECDC, in November and May. We also had the Ferguson report in April and the more recent report from the HSE. There have been lots of conversations around comparisons, infectious versus non-infectious, symptomatic versus asymptomatic, serial versus single-point in time, self-administered versus laboratory administered, sensitivity, specificity, different platforms and testing strategies and yet we are back at the place we were last November, saying that there is not enough evidence. We have heard very strong and compelling evidence from a range of people - and the witnesses will have heard this themselves - who say that serial antigen testing could be an improvement on the regime that we currently have in place. I take that as an opportunity. What they are saying is that antigen testing could be an improvement on what we have now which is the single-point in time PCR test 72 hours prior to departure, with people free to go about their business after that. The weakness of the current regime must be recognised, as well as the potential of antigen testing to improve it.

Why have no pilot studies taken place in the aviation sector since 3 November? Who made that decision? Who decided to focus more generally on the meat industry and the third level sector?