Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We just witnessed another reason the manipulation of the speaking order is very regressive step. The senior Minister has left before the opening spokespeople of four different groups in the Parliament will have a chance to put points to him, whereas he has heard three or four from his own party before that. It is a disgrace. In the two minutes I have left I will say this: the Minister questioned some of the Opposition over pointing to the inconsistencies in the guidelines and the messages and he says that we have the information, we know and we should not be pointing things out. That is not true. We do not know what NPHET thinks. More important, we do not know what the experts and scientists on the expert advisory group, which advises NPHET, think. I have been saying this since March. Fianna Fáil were backing us in this point beforehand when I asked for the expert advisory group, that is, the actual scientists, to publish their minutes. They eventually published a few of them. Does the House know how far behind they are behind on those minutes so that we know what they are thinking about all these measures? The latest minutes were published at the end of June. That is how much of a gap there is between the considerations of the scientists and experts and our knowledge. The latest NPHET minutes were published on 12 August.

We, therefore, have no clue what the experts think and whether it bears any relationship whatsoever to the ham-fisted, contradictory, inconsistent guidelines, communications and statements from the Minister. The result is we are losing faith and the people are losing faith in the Covid-19 strategy of the Government as infections rise. Let us consider even the publication of information today about private houses. This information states that we can open the pubs and do not need to worry because it is all in private houses. I thought: how did it get into the private houses? Did it come through the walls? Did it magically appear? No. As Professor Sam McConkey helpfully pointed out on the news, it probably came from work or whatever. Are we gathering that information? No.

The HSE's data hub has next to no information. We have no clue where the community transmissions are coming from because we do not gather the information. That suggests that the contact tracing system is a mess because we are not gathering the data that would allow us to track and trace the virus.

See this speech in context