Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

The general perception of people is that there is a lot of confusion around the public heath advice. There is a reason for this, namely, the public health advice is not followed consistently, but instead the interests of private profit are allowed to interfere and interact with it. I am concerned the plan for living with Covid-19 is being institutionalised with the establishment of the Covid-19 oversight group, which effectively functions as a buffer as I understand it between NPHET and the Government. This group receives the public health advice from NPHET, which works it out in terms of the impact economically, socially, etc., and there the interests of private profit can come to bear. I also have a concern that this group is going to delay the process in that it is due to meet weekly and then report to NPHET, which will then have to pass on that advice to Government at a time when speed and movement in terms of action on public health is necessary.

The message of individual responsibility is not the right message. What is required is collective responsibility and the Government needs to take public action. At the heart of that action is the testing and tracing system. By way of comparison, Denmark, which has a similar population to Ireland, is now testing close to 200,000 people per week. In Ireland, 75,000 tests were carried out last week and a few weeks ago fewer than 60,000 were being carried out. In Denmark, there are free testing facilities publicly available, with testing available to anybody who wants it, including at the airports, yet here we are not even testing everybody in a classroom when there is a known Covid case. It is absolute madness. We are six months into a highly contagious pandemic and the Government is still rationing testing because it is trying to do it on the cheap. We had the opportunity to get ahead of the virus over the summer months. Will the resources be applied to bring our testing and tracing regime up to scratch?

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