Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As Deputy Pringle said, and this is not a problem, sometimes we only hear the bad as politicians. That is a good thing that we get to bring the challenges and things not going well to the floor of this House. I respect that fully. I can tell Deputy Pringle that we are publishing testing figures every week concerning how many tests are completed. The Deputy is not just hearing that from the HSE or people like me. I heard the president of the Irish College of General Practitioners, ICGP, Dr. Mary Favier, in the national media the other day saying that things were better than they were the previous week and they will be better this week than last week.

They do need to continue to improve, however, and I am very clear on that. Testing and tracing is in a better place now than it was a few weeks ago, but it is not yet where we need it to be. We need to improve and build on it further. I went to visit a contact tracing centre yesterday to see the plans. A fair bit of what is involved is automation. If we know at the moment that 97% of people who get a test result are getting a negative result, and if one of us then has a test and it is negative, I would be happy to receive that result by text message-----

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