Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate Deputy Kelly and wish him well in his new role. I send good wishes to Deputy McDonald.

On behalf of the Social Democrats, I extend our deepest sympathies to the families of all of those people who, sadly, have been lost to this deadly pandemic. Again I pay tribute to our public health officials, to all of those people working on the front line in the health service, in supporting the health service in its important work, in the retail sector and in the delivery sector, and to all of those other key people who provide such important services to us at this very difficult time.

The public health officials have provided very good and sound advice to the Government, which the Government has followed. The Opposition has been happy, across the board, to support the Government in following that advice. It has proved to be very good advice. We are, however, moving towards a point at which we will need to involve other people in the advice and decision-making relating to those areas that go beyond the strict public health issues. I will talk about those in a moment.

I also want to take a moment to talk about what is happening in our nursing homes. I hope that, in the next session, the Minister for Health will respond with facts in respect of the questions we put down. It has to be a matter of serious concern when one of our leading consultants, Dr. Jack Lambert, refers to what is going on in nursing homes as a national catastrophe, and he did that at lunchtime today. There is no doubt we are exposing many very vulnerable citizens through a response that is not adequate at the moment, and that must be addressed as a matter of urgency.

When we look at the figures that we hear every evening, there is no doubt that those headline figures are slightly encouraging. They are beginning to steady a little bit, and we draw comfort from that. However, there is no doubt that, as the curve is somewhat flattened, it raises other questions about the strategy that is being pursued and in respect of testing and tracing. There is no doubt that strategy is not operating satisfactorily. The reason for that is there is a logjam at the level of the laboratories because of the shortage of the required reagent. Everything that is based on that strategy, including the 50 test centres, including the new test centres, and all of the staff who have been mobilised, is not being used at the moment because of this logjam in the laboratories. That is why there is a need for an intervention.

That intervention should take place at the highest political level in terms of engaging with the pharmaceutical industry and addressing the fact that this reagent is a proprietary material. The fact that it is owned by particular commercial interests when the world is trying to respond to a deadly pandemic is shocking and a disgrace. There needs to be intervention. We have many pharmaceutical companies in this country. There needs to be serious, high-level intervention with those companies to establish how we can secure adequate volumes of that reagent and, more importantly, if we can secure access to the chemical formula for that reagent, because we know there are many laboratories in this country that could produce large quantities of it if the formula was made available. It is entirely unacceptable that commercial interests are preventing that from happening.

The second area where I believe there needs to be intervention is in securing access to adequate personal protective equipment, PPE. I have already called for a forum on medical supplies to be established. We have a lot of manufacturing capacity in this country. Nobody has yet explained to me why we cannot produce large quantities of PPE, especially gowns, which are in such short supply at the moment. Again, we need to put such a forum together and to bring in all of those commercial interests. The HSE is working might and main to secure such PPE from different parts of the world, but we need to look seriously at what can be produced here and at what can be done domestically.

The third area I want to raise is the question of, as we get to a point where the curve is starting to flatten, what the exit strategy is going to be.

We have to start thinking about that. There are two approaches, namely, containment or eradication. We have seen where other island countries have had a lot of success by taking the eradication approach. We too are an island, and while the situation in the North of Ireland complicates this matter enormously, we need to do the cost-benefit analysis of restricting entry at our ports and airports. The questions are who will take the key decisions about when we might ease up on the restrictions, the basis on which we would do so, and how we will strike the balance between getting people back to work while keeping them safe. They are questions that need to be addressed in a much wider forum than that of public health. Clearly they need to be informed substantially by public health experts, but we need other people involved in that as well.

That is why I believe we have got to the point now where there is a need for a high-level task force to be established to consider all of those key issues that need to be taken into consideration in planning an exit strategy and to listen to the advice from across a range of different disciplines. It is now time to set up such that high-level task force. It must be led by the Taoiseach and must involve cross-party interests, but it must involve all of those other interests that can feed into this key decision that we have to take now in this country.

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