Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for her answer, which I accept. I welcome the talk of flexibility. As I said, it is to be hoped we will meet with solution-oriented good sense on all sides.

I will move straight to my second question. We all hope that this is short term. There is an issue faced by hearing-impaired children who rely partly on lip reading. If the pandemic is to go on for a considerable period, we will need to look into mitigations for that and extra supports into the future.

Schools will be relied on to supply masks. There will be children from disadvantaged backgrounds, children from households without a great deal of money, and children from quite chaotic backgrounds where this will just not be on anybody's agenda. We will, therefore, need to rely on the schools. I have no doubt that they will step up, but they will need whatever supports are necessary.

With regard to required mitigation, we have had many conversations on ventilation and high-efficiency particulate air, HEPA, filters. At this stage, people are asking why the work in this regard has not been done and when we will get to where we need to be. Even where there are CO2 monitors, there are freezing conditions because windows are being opened and all the rest of it. We just need to do the due diligence on ventilation.