Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I wish to endorse the Deputy's comments about the need to protect the health and mental health of our HSE staff. The points he made were very relevant and well made. They are issues I bear in mind every day, knowing so many people who work in our health service at the moment and knowing the pressures they are under.

Many of us will have been following the debate around the wearing of face masks. There is no dispute that people who have symptoms or are sneezing or coughing should wear a mask in order to reduce the chance of passing the infection on to others. There is no debate about the fact that people in healthcare settings caring for patients with Covid-19 should wear masks and in particular circumstances should wear respiratory masks. There are differing opinions and the experts do not agree on whether masks or face coverings should be worn more generally. Some say it is effective, some say it is not effective. Some even say it can be counterproductive, particularly if people are not changing their masks regularly, do not wash them, hang them around their necks or touch them. The jury is totally out on whether it is a good idea for the asymptomatic population to wear masks in public, but the trend certainly seems to be going that way. Whether that is backed up by science is more questionable. As a Government we will be taking the advice of the national public health emergency team on that question. This week it is once again considering what advice we should give on the wearing of masks. We definitely need to make sure that we do not create a supply problem where masks are concerned. At the moment we have a lot of masks for our healthcare staff and those who need them.

We do not want everyone in Ireland to wear 4 million masks a day because we would then have a shortage of masks for our healthcare workers. We must bear in mind all of these different issues, constraints and priorities.

Deputy Pearse Doherty asked about a particular delivery and I will have to check the details of that. Different deliveries are being made all the time. There are 30 deliveries due from China and I am not sure if one came in last night or not. Other deliveries are due from Ireland and other EU countries. An issue has arisen with deliveries from China as a result of new customs controls that have been imposed by the Chinese provinces to check the quality of products before they go out. That will cause a delay in some of those deliveries which we were not aware of until the past couple of days.

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