Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Now for another stream of consciousness. I join the Taoiseach and other leaders in offering the Labour Party's collective sympathies to those who have lost loved ones this week, although I must acknowledge that the trends we are seeing are very positive. I thank everybody for their collective work across the country on this. I also pay tribute to our front-line heroes. This week saw International Nurses Day. We all acknowledge the incredible work done by nurses across the country. However, it is not enough simply to thank our nursing fraternity, which is made up of incredible public servants who are doing so much at the moment. Real commitments were made to all our nurses last year that need to be honoured, but are not being honoured. Approximately, 6,000 healthcare workers have been affected by Covid, of whom over 2,300 are nurses. This figure is the one of the highest in Europe. They need to be protected and they need to get their PPE. I had to deliver some PPE in the past number of weeks and have helped to organise PPE coming in for a number of weeks. They need the best protection available because they really are the front line. That figure is very frightening. I hope I have everybody's support when I say we need to do more for them.

I also want the Taoiseach to ask the Minister for Health to ensure he signs an order that all payments due to nurses across the country are paid. This dates back to March 2019. It might surprise the House that a considerable number of nurses have not received their due and many of them are due an awful lot of back pay. A total of 890 nurses in the mid west are due €1.6 million so it is not insignificant. There is also agreement with regard to setting up a group on nurse management pay, which will conclude this week, but it has not even sat. We are talking about nurse management pay so perhaps the Taoiseach could embellish and bring that along.

As the Taoiseach is aware, I have raised the issue of transparency with him for a number of weeks.

I received a letter from the Taoiseach and, just before I came in here, I received a letter from the Minister for Health acceding to a lot of what I have requested and hopefully that will transpire. However, I want to point out that, when I started raising these questions, I did so because transparency is not a luxury. The minutes of the six most recent meetings of the National Public Health Emergency Team, NPHET, have still not been published. That is not acceptable, given the commitments the Taoiseach gave on the matter. We are being ignored and that is not acceptable.

There was a pretty embarrassing situation yesterday. This is not, and is not meant to be, a slight on the Taoiseach. The Taoiseach made some pretty honest comments yesterday about schools and childcare that related to what he had been told by Dr. Michael Ryan of the WHO and representatives of HIQA. Those comments were subsequently shut down by the Chief Medical Officer, CMO. That was a critical moment for all of us in this House. It was not good for the body politic and is something on which we all need to reflect. The Taoiseach definitely needs to reflect on it because it was not good. I do not say that in any personal way. For the public to hear one message coming from the Taoiseach and, a couple of hours later, to hear the opposite message coming from the CMO is not good. The chronology, the way in which messaging is done between NPHET, particularly the CMO, and the Government needs to change. There needs to be one voice, that of the Government.

I want the Taoiseach to publish the letters from the HSE to the Minister and Department of Health of 19 and 20 April regarding governance issues. They still have not been published although I understand they will be soon. I hope that a lot of these governance issues will be dealt with by the Covid committee, which we asked to be set up at the first outing of this Dáil, something that everybody shot down at the time but have now come around to. I am delighted that my good friend and colleague, Deputy Michael McNamara, took up our suggestion to put his name forward and has been supported as chairperson of that committee.

I want to concentrate on issues relating to competency in the context of how we are coming out of this crisis. I want particularly to concentrate on what has happened with the leaving certificate examinations, childcare and how we are going to get our health services back. I also want to point out that we need an intervention from the Minister for Finance as to how the banks are performing, particularly as it relates to mortgages. Mortgage approval is being denied or put back for anybody whose employer has put them on a Covid payment. That is an unacceptable action that has been taken by many banks.

I turn to the botched childcare situation. Was that the original scheme that the Minister for Health, Deputy Harris, said he had nine weeks ago when he showed it to me under his arm? I am not sure it was. Any of us who looked into this scheme knew that it was not going to work. I found the way it was announced strange. Schemes do not fall just before the 9 o'clock news as they did last night. It was amazing, after the statements of the Taoiseach and the CMO, that the scheme fell by 9 o'clock last night. We all knew that scheme was not going to work. Issues relating to insurance must be dealt with. The issues relating to this scheme, whereby the Taoiseach did not consult with the providers or those who needed it, meant that it was always going to fail.

I do not agree with the Taoiseach's commentary on insurance. I respectfully ask him to look at this again. We are the first party to come out and say that we need an indemnity scheme that will be levied on the insurance industry. My colleagues and I are talking to people all the time. It is not just across the childcare sector that businesses cannot open. There will be a number of businesses in other areas that will not be able to open either. This needs to be looked at in an intricate way because otherwise the roadmap will not happen. We are not talking about insurance for those who act in a reckless way. In fact, we are saying that people who would act recklessly should not be insured in any way, shape or form.

I have two specific points to make about the leaving certificate. School profiling has to go. It is completely wrong, as my colleague, Deputy Ó Ríordáin, has made clear in the Chamber in the last couple of days. We also have a question mark over the legality of what is happening. Put simply, will somebody who passes the exam this year be able to join An Garda Síochána, where it is mandatory to have a leaving certificate? I would like the Taoiseach to reflect on that because I do not think they can unless subsequent legislation is passed because such a person will not have a certificate. The State Examinations Commission will not be sitting.

A separate section is being set up in the Department to deal with this, the reason being that it is not the leaving certificate. Will the Taoiseach deal with that point?

An issue I have been talking about for some weeks now is that of preventable non-Covid-related deaths, which I believe will surpass Covid-related deaths if the trajectory goes on the way it is going in the coming weeks. We have 42 people on trolleys in University Hospital Limerick, UHL, as I stand here. That is not very good for infection control. What is the plan for the roll-out of a roadmap for the health services? What I have heard from the Health Service Executive to date is not inspiring, probably through no fault of its own. From where will it get the capacity it needs?

We will have to continue with private hospitals in a different way because of rostering requirements. How will we fit in appointments and screening when everything is going to take longer? Diagnostics will take longer. How is work in the community going to happen for people with disabilities or mental health issues? All of that will take longer. Nurses, doctors and other healthcare staff will have to be provided with PPE. Scheduling will take longer and people will have to sit in their cars because there will not be waiting rooms. How is all this being planned for? We need a plan quickly and for it to be implemented. We had 2,000 nurses brought in from non-EU countries each year in recent years but only some 600 came in this year. How are we going to increase that number and ensure we can deal with the situation? When will screening be brought back, for example? The figures given by RTE in the past week are quite scary as regards the potential outcomes if we do not bring back screening in the coming weeks.

In producing a roadmap, we cannot just substitute or push out the volume of beds we will require by using Citywest or the new camp that has been set up in UHL. They are not sufficient for the level of patient activity there will be under many of the scenarios given. I am dying to see what plan will be put in place that will be able to deal with the situation. As a country and as a Government - the Taoiseach and his Cabinet and we, as a country, working collectively - we have got to a certain phase in dealing with Covid-19. That is thanks to many people across the country, including, dare I say it, the Government. However, we are now at a different milestone and there are issues regarding the roadmap and how we deal with that roadmap, how we interchange and make decisions, and how we deal with those decisions competently. I believe competence has dropped over recent weeks in relation to a whole range of issues I have just outlined. We need to deal with insurance and the issues relating to education. Most of all, and I am begging the Taoiseach on this point because I believe it will have a life or death impact for many people, we need a plan that is considered, resourced and which will work for the roll-out of non-Covid services across the healthcare service. It cannot wait any longer and the plan that is being envisaged, which the Minister for Health will talk about later today, is simply too long and will not work.

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