John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)
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I thank our witnesses for those very interesting documents and presentations. This issue has major implications. I am interested in the application of ventilation. I visited a lot of schools in my constituency prior to Christmas and the way in which the age of the building influenced how the school managed ventilation was really interesting. With the ultra-modern, state-of-the-art buildings, big and bright and with a huge amount of natural light, which is really healthy, and quite open indoor plaza spaces, I got a sense that they were very well ventilated from a design and engineering point of view. In the schools that were 30 or 40 years old the ventilation consisted of wide open entrance doors, windows open in every classroom, cold classrooms and children and teachers wearing warmer clothes. That is simply unsustainable. As we move forward now, particularly into retail and hospitality spaces, the role of ventilation is critical, whether or not it is with a view to dealing with a further pandemic at some stage down the road. We know indoors is a no-no, but what have we learned about the obvious hospitality activities of eating and drinking and how we can apply those lessons to those areas? What kind of advice are the witnesses now in a position to give? What are we learning? What is the halfway house or even the quarter-way house between fully open-air, which is almost but not completely impossible in the Irish context, and indoors, which is impossible in the context of a pandemic? What kinds of lessons have we learned?