Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I believe this is also relevant to the debate around our ability to have committee hearings. Public health advice about the health implications of proximity is acting as a barrier to having further committees to cover the many different areas in our society where people are in real trouble and need their voices heard. We are told we can only have one committee because of physical constraints relating to public health guidelines. It looks like these are just excuses.

I will throw a real spanner into the works now. There is no consistency on the issue of who is considered a close contact of a person who is Covid-positive. I am sure all Members have been reading the RTÉ website since the outbreak of this crisis. At the end of every single article, it says that a person who has been in close contact in the same room as somebody else for more than 15 minutes - not two hours - is a close contact. It says that this is the public health advice. On that basis, nothing in this country would be operating at all. It is nonsense. We need consistency on this. The difference is that essential workers have been working all the time under very different conditions of close contact - according to these definitions, for two hours or 15 minutes - to keep our society functioning-----

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