Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I was involved in the country's response to Covid from day one. I was at all the meetings where the big decisions were made and I can assure everyone in this House that our overriding concern always was to reduce the number of people who got infected and to minimise the number of deaths in all settings, whether in the community, in care homes or in hospitals. We know now from the data on excess deaths provided by the Health Information and Quality Authority, HIQA, that we overestimated significantly the number of excess deaths in Ireland. The reason we counted the way we did was that we thought it the right thing to do in terms of saving lives to overcount, because we could then contact-trace suspected cases, not just confirmed cases, which other countries did not do. The excess death figures produced by HIQA tell us a lot, including that we may be one of the few countries significantly revising down the number of deaths during the pandemic period. For some people, they saw the crisis as some sort of competition as to where they were in a league table. There was really hateful and nasty stuff from people who thought it was a sort of competition between countries. When they saw Ireland high up on a league table, they almost took a perverse pleasure in it because it was an opportunity to have a go at the Government, Dr. Holohan or whomever. I deplore that kind of attitude and those kinds of people, I must say, because they did nothing at all to help us when it came to fighting Covid.

See this speech in context