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

I welcome the Minister. He has my support during a tricky time in terms of the new regulations. If you can tease out the different details, there is broad acceptance among the public of the need for them, especially when on considers the international context relating to the variant. A number of weeks ago, the Taoiseach, in the context of delaying the relaxations, mentioned that the Delta variant was working its way through Scotland and that we would be informed by what happened there to see if there was a correlation between case increases and increases hospitalisations, which there does not seem to have been. Scotland is now beginning to relax. I do not have a question. We are a few weeks behind Scotland in terms of that, and I hope we can look forward to positive news on this.

With regard to the national maternity hospital, as I said at the briefing we had with him, the Minister inherited this. I do not envy him. He may be able to clarify the position with regard to November 2019, when the then Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, told the Dáil that the new national maternity hospital would involve State-owned buildings on State land and that he anticipated the details of the legal transfer would be sorted out in the weeks that followed. What went wrong? Briefly.