Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister signed off on the regulations that determine what limitations there are on people's liberty. Essentially, we are all subject to house imprisonment, except for being allowed to avail of essential services or to visit essential retail outlets. The essential retail outlets are listed clearly to be fair to the Minister. The list says that hardware stores are essential retail outlets, as are outlets that provide equipment for gardening. Given that, why are other Ministers going on the airwaves saying that garden centres and hardware stores should only open in emergency situations and should not be open? When this Chamber delegates the power to the Minister to make law, and he clearly makes law, surely that should be adhered to and other Ministers should not be giving information that is contrary to that law. I would like the Minister to confirm whether the regulations he has signed off on say in black and white that hardware stores and garden centres are essential retail outlets or whether they do not.

Ursula von der Leyen's criteria for opening up have been mentioned quite a bit. She also spoke about moving away from blanket measures and more towards regional measures. The law which this House passed, which gives the Minister the power to make the orders, talks about areas and regions and the Minister chose to make an order in respect of the whole country. The transmission rates are different across the country and there are particular pockets of infection. Has the Minister given consideration to having different regimes in place for different areas? What is required for a city such as London, where there are 2 million people on the Underground every day is different to what is required for a city such as Dublin and is different again to what is required for rural Clare. However, it seems to me that regardless of that, there is the same infringement on liberty, on people going about their lives, on people seeing their family members and on people earning some money - because ultimately the health service has to be paid for, whether it is paid for through a planned economy or a capitalist economy but either way, we need a functioning economy to provide for the health service. Has the Minister given consideration to that?

One of the tracing measures which will probably be looked at is an app. I heard the Minister answer questions on this point already. Will there be open sourcing in advance? Will the coding be published in advance? If not, why not? If the coding is not published in advance and if there is no open source coding, how will the app get buy-in from the public? People will obviously be distrustful of the app if they are carrying it around while it is collating essential information about where they are at any time and who they meet. People will understandably want to know who that information is being collated for, where it is going and who it is being given to. Will that be open source coding and if not, why not?

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