Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

There is quite a bit of information starting to emerge relating to the cost of Covid-19 and the restrictions. Do not get me wrong, as I understand that governance in this period was extremely difficult. The issue was live and it was very hard to make decisions, as information may not have been fully at the disposal of the Government. There is much information coming out now on the massive increase in domestic violence that occurred, in part, because of the restrictions and the length of their imposition. There was also the cancellation of cancer care and consequences for diagnoses, as well as the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of BreastCheck appointments. There were difficulties for the mental health of younger people especially. In the first quarter of 2021, only one country in the whole of Europe had stopped building homes, and that was Ireland, despite it probably having one of the worst housing crises in the whole of Europe.

There is a necessity for a real investigation into this. I am not looking for heads or individuals to lose their ability to do their jobs. It is really important, nonetheless, with the benefit of hindsight and understanding of the real costs, to measure them against the necessity to protect against a live virus and conduct a robust investigation into what happened. In nursing homes, 10,000 people were moved from hospital beds to nursing homes in the first six months of 2020 and many of them were never tested for Covid-19. The nursing home sector sought to close its doors to visitors in March and April 2020 but the National Public Health Emergency Team, NPHET, said the doors to visitors should be kept open for visitors to circulate in hospitals. The HSE took personal protective equipment and staff away from nursing homes in 2020 when those nursing homes were crying out for staff.

A range of decisions were made that had a significant impact on the health and well-being of individuals and we need more than an analysis of that. We need to be able to have a proper, detailed, forensic understanding of those decisions and the impact they had to ensure we do not repeat them.