Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

On behalf of People Before Profit, I extend my deepest sympathies to the families and friends of those who have lost loved ones to Covid-19. I pay tribute to the millions of people who, through their sacrifice and effort in physical distancing, have substantially impacted on the transmission of Covid-19 to protect the ability of our health services to cope. Most of all, I pay tribute to our front-line health workers and other essential workers who are protecting us and keeping us going. As Deputy Kelly stated, we have also for a number of weeks called on the Government, and I call on the Taoiseach again and the Government, to give specific reward or hazard payments to front-line health workers and essential workers who are risking their health on behalf of all of us. That is the least we could do for them.

I welcome the fact that the Government has accepted the need to answer questions, notwithstanding some fairly disingenuous condemnations of those of us who thought it was important that the House would sit and that Ministers would be subject to questioning at the previous sitting.

I begin my questions with a political one. How do Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael believe they are fit to return to power or that we should believe their promises of a new political departure, when after the previous financial crisis of 2008, they made the same promises but proceeded to savage the staffing and capacity levels of our health service prior to this public health emergency, to the point where we have some of the lowest levels of ICU capacity, GP cover, staffing and hospital beds in the whole of the western world? Is it not the case that the privatisation and austerity policies that were pursued for the past ten years by those parties have contributed to the tragic emergency that is emerging in our nursing homes because of a largely privatised, completely fragmented, under-resourced and undersupported nursing home sector? Is it not unacceptable but a legacy of the policies and priorities of those two parties that 600 private consultants can hold this country over a barrel, as it were, in the face of a public health emergency? It is absolutely shocking. Will the Taoiseach please explain to me the incredible situation where this country has one of the biggest pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries in the world, yet we are suffering chronic shortages of personal protection equipment, vital medical equipment and chemical reagents necessary to bring up the level of testing to that which we need to exit this crisis?

Mr. Paul Reid cites proprietorial issues as an explanation which in layman's terms means private patents and profit-seeking by the companies that own the patents for chemical reagents. Can the Taoiseach explain why a private consultancy with no medical expertise whatsoever was given the job of recruiting from the 70,000 heroic volunteers to Be On Call for Ireland and to integrate them into the health service? From the numbers, the job does not seem to be going too well in terms of integration. I am referring to CPL. Can the Minister explain the extraordinary appointment of a management consultant from the accountancy firm Ernst & Young to spearhead the ramping up of the testing and contact tracing regime, which we desperately need, rather than public health experts, scientists and medics? That same person has now been given the job of spearheading the transition back to "business as usual" rather than the public health experts, scientists and doctors who should be deciding when we lift restrictions, how we do so and how we transition back to the normality that our citizens desperately want, to the so-called "new normal". Those sorts of appointments suggest that nothing has changed in approach. This crisis should lead us on to a recognition that we have to depart radically from the policies of privatisation and of putting profit and commercial interests first that have left our health service completely under-resourced and under capacity in the face of this crisis. It is only heroic health workers and the efforts of our population that are saving us from utter calamity. I conclude on that point. My colleagues, Deputies Paul Murphy and Bríd Smith, will have more detailed questions. These are serious questions for the Government and I look forward to getting actual answers, which we have not gotten for the last four to six weeks in the face of this emergency.

See this speech in context