Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I want to acknowledge the families who have lost loved ones in the last week and also workers. I have five questions for the Taoiseach, the first of which relates to workers. As of 26 May, more than 32% of Covid cases here have been healthcare workers, which is worrying. We are an outlier. ECDC analysis shows the infection rate among healthcare workers in the US is 3%; in China, it is 4%; in Italy it is 10% and in Spain it is 20%. I accept these rates could have changed since that date but they are the rough figures. As I said, we are an outlier.

SIPTU and the nurses' unions have raised their deep concerns about this. Why are we an outlier? When will the HSE and the Health Protection Surveillance Centre, HPSC, do an analysis of what has gone wrong here? Something must have seriously gone wrong for that figure of 32% to exist. Will the Taoiseach commit to that analysis being carried out and published as soon as possible?

The second issue I wish to discuss is secondary healthcare. Where is the reopening plan from the HSE? It has been announced a number of times. One of the five key criteria is secondary morbidity and secondary mortality. Where is the modelling on this? I have been raising this matter for a month now. Where is the plan and why has it not been announced? It is deeply worrying. Dr. Anthony O'Connor of the Irish Medical Organisation, IMO, said in this Chamber that we could have 1 million people waiting for appointments, and that is a conservative estimate because 3.2 million people get appointments every year. The Government made a political decision in the last week not to renew the contract with the private hospitals, and it made a political decision not to look at purchasing them. The political consequence of that is that we are going to have huge backlogs, increased morbidity and increased mortality. That is a political consequence of a political decision. Where is the plan? I want to see it. We have no screening, mental health services, disability and community services, elective procedures or services in a whole range of other areas. We need to see the modelling and the plan for how we are going to deal with this because people are really regressing.

That brings me to the roadmap. People are getting ahead of the politicians, as is often the case. Professor Jack Lambert was right when he said that we, as a nation, need to think rationally again. We need to look at what is high and low risk. While I accept what the Taoiseach said about the three-week intervals for data analysis, surely we should also analyse whether we need five phases instead of four. What we were looking at when the Government set out the five phases was different from what we are looking at now. Things have moved. We now know that we have to live with this virus for a considerable period. We cannot put everything into hibernation, including society, the economy, and particularly secondary healthcare, which I have always raised. Will the Taoiseach look at the rigidity of the roadmap and consider changing it to four phases?

Will the Taoiseach also examine the communication process? The daily briefings are causing more confusion now. At the very beginning, people would ask me whether they should be listening to the Taoiseach or the Chief Medical Officer, CMO, because at times, there can be different messaging. I always said they should listen to the Taoiseach, but in the last few weeks I have been telling them to listen to the CMO. That is not the way our country should work. If there are going to be daily briefings, I ask that they be about all public health issues, including secondary morbidity and mortality and all the issues in the plan which has not yet been launched. We need that. The Government needs to get in control of the message because when there are contradictions between what NPHET is saying through the CMO, what the Government is saying and the various different pronouncements of a range of eminent public health experts, that breeds confusion.

I refer to the pandemic unemployment payment for young people. Some 135,000 people between the ages of 18 and 24 are on the Covid payment, many of them working in very low-paying sectors such as hospitality, tourism and retail. The Government's decision is going to strike at a whole cohort of young people in this country, and that is not right. It goes against what people are doing across other jurisdictions in trying to ensure there is finance out there, but it is a particular slight on young people. They do not have the same opportunities for jobs because of where they are in life. Many of them would have only moved into full-time work at the time Covid hit. They are being discriminated against. I ask the Taoiseach to please not do this. As far as I and the Labour Party are concerned, this is discrimination.

It is ageist. It is against a whole sector of our community.

Finally, black lives do matter and we do not have to look far in this country to find examples of discrimination and racism. Will the Taoiseach and the current Government or his party commit to ending direct provision? That is the real discrimination and racism that is going on in this country, as I am sure he will acknowledge. It has to end. We all have to make sure that collectively and politically we end it. What is going on in Miltown Malbay in terms of the standard of food people are eating, leaks coming through the roof and the fact that people cannot leave where they are because they have no form of exercise in the area is not humane. Will the Taoiseach commit to addressing that?

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