Jim O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am now even more concerned about this lockdown than when I spoke here three weeks ago. I am extremely concerned about its impact on young people, children, the elderly, people who are suffering from non-Covid illnesses, our economy and indeed those people in society who are the most financially insecure. I am also concerned that too much responsibility has casually been delegated by Government to our public health advisers.

As I said previously, it made absolute sense back in March that we introduced measures for the lockdown. In fact, I was critical that we had not introduced some soon enough, such as restrictions on travel into the country from Italy. However, now we need to recognise that the process of lifting the lockdown provisions needs to be expedited. I call on the Minister, Deputy Bruton, to take that back to his colleagues in government.

We note that the numbers of deaths have fortunately reduced quite significantly. When looked at objectively at present, the death numbers in Ireland were quite high but we have managed to get the death numbers down and we have also got the number of cases down.

It is important to recognise that it is the job of our public health advisers to provide public health advice, but it is not their job to weigh that public health advice along with other factors. That is the function of Government. The Government needs to start introducing some balance and proportionality into the decisions it is about to make as to when and whether the restrictions should be lifted. As I said, I believe they need to be lifted sooner rather than later.

The reality, as I said previously, is that we will need to continue to live with Covid. We need to recognise that we will have to live with a certain amount of risk. It has never been the case that public health advice was mandatory on people. We also need to recognise that the purpose of the lockdown was to stop our hospital intensive care units being overrun. However, we cannot now transform the purpose of the lockdown into being that we want to use it for the purpose of stopping people getting sick. That was never the purpose of the lockdown and it would be highly unusual if that was to be the purpose of its continuance. The Government has been extremely cautious to date. I can understand why politicians are extremely cautious because if they get it wrong, they get heavily criticised.

I ask the Minister to take back to Cabinet the message that we need to be less cautious in expediting the lifting of the restrictions. There will be a benefit if they are lifted sooner rather than later. They should not be left in place simply because it is the cautious and safe thing to do. A dichotomy is developing between those who are economically secure and those who are not. We need to take into account the latter, as well as the broad impact the lockdown is having on our society. I ask the Minister to speak up at Cabinet and I call on the Government to get its testing regime in place. That is at the heart of curing this problem and enabling society to get going again.

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