Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

More than ever before, people around the country are suffering from mental health problems. Has guidance been provided to mental health services on how to deliver standard mental health services to people by video call, both to protect the patients and the healthcare workers? I understand that has already happened in the UK.

The Taoiseach told us there is no roadmap for how to exit this crisis. We need one because we need to know how to reopen the economy and get back to normal. A roadmap has been published by Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner of the federal Food and Drug Administration in America. He has provided four steps, starting from lockdown which is the phase in which we are. Lockdown seems to be working but we cannot stay in that phase forever. The second phase is when we start to relax restrictions and we can do that only when testing is rapid, contact tracing is comprehensive and isolation is effective.

Our testing has been far too slow and I know the Government is working on this. The knock-on effect of that is that contact tracing is completely ineffective. It is too late to approach somebody three or four weeks after they have shown symptoms. Contact tracing simply has not been working and the Minister knows and accepts that.

There are thousands of unemployed people who would like to take part in the contact tracing effort, have registered to do so and heard nothing in return. I would like the Minister to comment on that.

Technology can help us. Will the Minister support Google and Apple in their announcement that they want to co-operate to produce an application that can help with contact tracing on the basis that it respects privacy?

The third phase of Dr. Gottlieb's roadmap is drug therapies or a vaccine. It is only at that stage we can get away from social distancing and that could take a year. People need to know that and the Minister needs to say that. It is at that point that people will be able to return to normal life.

The final phase, after doing all these things, is that we are prepared for the next pandemic. We have seen outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, Middle East respiratory syndrome, MERS, human immunodeficiency viruses, HIV, ebola, human papillomavirus, HPV, Zika virus, Lassa virus, yellow fever and smallpox in recent memory. It would not make sense for us to see Covid-19 as a strange outlier. We need to prepare our health system, personal protective equipment, medicines and so on for the next microbial pandemic after Covid-19. I ask the Minister to create a pandemic preparedness unit or pandemic readiness unit within the Department of Health.

I thank the Minister for his recent statement in support of the World Health Organization, WHO, as it comes under fire from the President of America. That took some courage. As a gesture of solidarity, and to show that we believe in science and medicine, I call on the Minister to immediately increase Ireland's contribution to the WHO to help, in even a small way, and fill the moral and financial vacuum created by President Trump's terrible action.

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