Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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I thank the witnesses for their contributions. I have three disparate questions so perhaps I will put them first and whoever wishes can reply.

Essentially a lot of public health advice is drawn from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, ECDPC, but there is a quite a variation in how this manifests itself across different countries in terms of the advice given or taken. It was said earlier that it is up to the experts to advise governments but that it is up to governments to make decisions. Is there much deviation from public health advice across Europe? There is a very high level of adherence to such advice here and a degree of questioning of that by the general public.

My second question relates to the variation across parliaments. As was mentioned earlier, we have a written Constitution which requires Members to be present and voting in our Dáil Chamber. Remote voting would actually require a referendum which is not something we want to conduct in the middle of a pandemic. We also have an unusually high number of Independent Deputies so scaling down the numbers proportionately is more problematic in our Parliament. Are there any similar situations from which we could learn in terms of how to manage this? I will leave it at that for now but if there is time, I will come back in with a third question.