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

I will try to ask five questions in five minutes and hopefully I will get five answers. The first relates to the strategy the national effort is based on, that is, a strategy of test and trace on a large-scale basis - 15,000 a day. We have heard that promise for several weeks now and we are currently at 5,000 a day. Does the Minister accept that the point at which we can start to ease restrictions and get back to some kind of normality is entirely dependent on reaching that figure of 15,000 tests a day and having the capacity to continue that for the foreseeable future? Does he also accept that the level of national debt that will be incurred as a result of this pandemic is entirely dependent on putting in place the strategy which has been promised from the very beginning, which is to test and trace 15,000 a day? We are very far from that at this point. We are doing 5,000 tests a day, and we have no data in respect of the numbers that are traced. The Minister did not provide that figure when he was asked for it earlier. I am asking the Minister again for the second week if he can tell us when that figure of 15,000 tests and trace - end to end - will be achieved. Is he in a position to guarantee that that will be available for the foreseeable future?

With regard to nursing homes, this has been the same problem that we have throughout the health service where our services are hospital-centric and there continues to be an overlooking of social care settings. That is exacerbated by the fact that there has been a move in recent years to privatise large numbers of nursing homes and other care settings and to disconnect them from the main health service and the HSE. Apart from saying mea culpa, does the Minister accept that that was a serious mistake? Can he tell us when we will get to a point where there will be adequate staff, adequate testing and adequate PPE for the vulnerable patients in all of those care settings? There is shared responsibility for that. It is the owners of those facilities and it is also the State but there has to be an acknowledgement that the privatisation of these services is a core problem.

Equally, when it comes to social care, there is the lower level of care and the higher level of neglect of the needs of this particular service, that is, the community services - home help services and home care workers - who again have been left to the four winds when it comes to ensuring their safety and the safety of the clients they visit. Many of them are visiting several clients every day. Again, it is about privatisation of this service. It is about pushing it out and keeping it at arm's length from the State. That has been the critical mistake. When will responsibility be taken for ensuring that all of those very low-paid workers, and their clients, will be given the protection they deserve? Who do these people contact when they need PPE? There seems to be a great deal of ambiguity about that. These are people working at community level on very low pay and left exposed.

My fourth question relates to the issue that arose last week in respect of Keelings and the fact that it seems to be acceptable that large numbers of seasonal workers are coming into this country. We are being told that they are following the guidelines that are set down but can the Minister tell us what, if any, supervision exists in respect of particularly large groups of people who come in from other countries and settle down somewhere in this country? We do not know anything about the conditions in which they are living. Apart from somebody handing them a leaflet at the airport, how can the Minister give us any kind of guarantee that those people are self-isolating properly in proper conditions? Can he tell us if he intends moving to a situation where there will be quarantining of people in those circumstances?

My last question relates to the deal that was done with private hospitals.

When will we get a breakdown of the figure of €1,461 per bed per day to be paid? It is very hard to understand how that figure was reached considering the equivalent figure in the UK is a small fraction of that. Does it include earned income from private patients who are in situin those hospitals? What the Minister tell us the actual figure involved and the basis of that figure?

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