Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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It is a pity we only have a short time to discuss the last point. We need to have more of these discussions but that is for another day and we will talk to the committees here about that.

Earlier Dr. Schaffer said that there is evidence that social gatherings, house parties and so on had contributed to the current situation. She may have information that we do not and this is part of the problem. People have also gone back to work. How do we know when it is stated that there is a high rate of infection among people aged under 40 years that it is due to attending parties or work? I am not convinced. I am not saying that it is or is not and I just do not know. We are flying blind and I do not know whether the public health authorities know this information but will not tell us or, even worse, do not know. I would like the witnesses to comment on that.

Notwithstanding the differences in opinion between Dr. Giesecke, Dr. Ryan and Professor McConkey, there does seem to be agreement that we could not possibly have enough testing, that the more testing we have, the better. Would mass screening of the population be possible if there was the political will to do it, in the same way that we have essentially eradicated certain diseases from the cattle herd, for example, which is a bit bigger than the population of this country? While it would be a big infrastructural investment and so on, if we knew where the virus was and with the pooling of testing, could it work if we did mass testing of the population, identified where the virus was and went after it?