Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to speak on this issue because across the country, thousands of people are doing their best to try to protect society and everybody around them. In general, people have bought into this because of the danger they have seen and the number of people in hospital and who have unfortunately lost their lives because of this Covid-19 virus. At the same time, however, they hear all these mixed messages coming from Government. One of the things we seem to be falling down on all the time, which is clearly the case in the Minister's Department, is that when laws are brought in, they are then transposed into regulations and those regulations seem to have stuff in them that was never mentioned when there was a debate on the legislation or when there was any talk of it before. We had that scenario last week and we had it on other occasions. There is an opportunity there and I know that the pre-legislative scrutiny which would normally take place here in the Legislature for all aspects of what we do throughout the Oireachtas is not possible under the circumstances we are in.

Post-legislative scrutiny should be happening in a more detailed way and we should consider some kind of pre-regulation scrutiny. Before regulations are introduced, there should be some forum in which they could be publicly debated and discussed in order that everybody can hear the pros and cons of the arguments. That would be beneficial not only from the point of view of Members of the Oireachtas and political people, but also from a societal perspective. The key thing we need to do is to get people to buy into all this legislation so there is a unity of purpose about defeating the coronavirus and moving forward.

Unfortunately, the Department of Health and the Minister have been seen to be quite chaotic in that regard and, for many people, incompetent. That is the word that I hear more often than anything else from the public. People do not want that incompetency to be replaced by recklessness, however. We have to be careful of that too. People are genuinely buying into what needs to happen, because they are afraid of what this virus can do to them and to people in their communities. They want to be part of the solution but we have to bring everyone with us and we must work much harder to do that. It makes no common sense, for example, to say that it is possible for 30 people to be on a field to play football, but it is not possible to have 50 or 60 people, mostly standing about 10 m apart, watching them. It makes no sense, especially when those people end up going into a public house somewhere and watching the game on a big screen. That is what is happening all over the country. It defies logic. What needs to happen is for someone to devise solutions which are logical, which work for people and which people will buy into. That needs to happen everywhere.

The situation regarding the pubs has also been messed around for a long time. We have this problem with the pubs because it was done wrongly in the first place. Stating that some pubs can open to serve food but others cannot in a town that might have six pubs, with two of them open and the others looking on, just causes chaos. It means that the two pubs in a town that might be open have more chance of being overcrowded. The Minister's responsibility is to deliver what works for people. I am glad to have this opportunity to put that to him. The reality is that what he has done to date has not worked for the majority of people and there is now an opportunity to change that.

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