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

First of all I will return to issues that arose yesterday at the meeting of the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response and to two questions I posed to HIQA. The first related to infection control reports. HIQA had carried out annual assessments and repeat offenders came to light - nursing homes about which there were particular concerns. We were told by the chief inspector that this list was sent to the Department in February and March and drew attention to HIQA's concerns in respect of Covid and poor infection control standards. The Minister made reference to 13 March. It was said that this letter was sent to him in February and in March. That is when these details were sent to him. This date, 13 March, was within the first two weeks of the virus arriving here. Will the Minister tell us what action was taken on foot of this letter? It was flagged to him that HIQA had serious concerns about 19 nursing homes.

Can he be more explicit about what was done at that stage? Surely alarm rings should have started to ring.

The second question I posed to Mr. Quinn was in relation to a point HIQA has been making consistently, which is that it had serious concerns about the lack of clinical oversight of the nursing home sector, and private nursing homes in particular. When I put the question to him about what he did with those concerns, he said he would have been in touch with the Department on several occasions in relation to them. I am asking the Minister what happened in response to those concerns being raised about the manner in which the nursing home sector operates and the fact, in an extraordinary way, that there is no clinical oversight of private nursing homes catering for the most vulnerable in our population. What did his Department do, if anything, in response to those serious concerns being raised? Perhaps he will come in on those two questions before I move on to the next.

See this speech in context