Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In the first instance the Deputy has asked about three key points in his part of Leaders’ Questions which I have noted and will deal with.

The Government’s plan is to suppress the virus and from the very beginning all political parties in this House took it as a basic principle that they would go with the advice of the public health authorities and that was accepted in this House. I am not so sure that it is accepted as much anymore, if truth be told and perhaps the Deputy should say what his views on this are. This is fundamental. We had much consensus from the outset of the pandemic in taking on board the advice, not just of the Chief Medical Officer but of NPHET and the broader public health community. This served us well and if one looks at comparators around Europe and internationally, the countries which broadly speaking - I am not saying to every single letter of the guideline issue - followed public health advice did much better as to mortality, illness and cases than those countries which chose to ignore initially the public health advice. We would all do well to reflect on that point. I sense the rush to try to dispense with this rule and that rule and every other instruction or advice that comes our way. Instinctively, we want to break free from the impact, the restraints and the restrictions of this pandemic. This is easier said than done. We want to suppress this virus but to live with it also. The Government will be producing a plan towards the middle of September which we will bring to the Dáil and which will create a framework around which we can live with the virus.

As I said last week we want to protect lives above all but we also want to protect livelihoods. That is key. As I said earlier we are monitoring the economic fallout which is very significant. We cannot be blind to the reality of the €25 billion to €30 billion deficit this year with further significant borrowing throughout 2021 to maintain and sustain the supports that we have in different sectors of the economy. These are the realities. There is a very strong economic dimension to this that we cannot ignore which does not ultimately trump the health dynamic which is essentially to protect lives and save people, but we have learned a lot from the first phase. We had to suspend elements in the reopening of the roadmap because public health advice said that it was important that we did that. The three local lockdowns, as they were called, in Laois, Offaly and Kildare, which were not quite the same as the national lockdown, worked. We thank the people of those counties who suffered a great deal in implementing and living with the severe restrictions that were introduced. The outcome from a public health perspective is that they worked in reducing and getting the case numbers down. We need to learn lessons from that.

See this speech in context