David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Of course, when people were in lockdown the numbers were going to go down. My point is that it was pointed out that when the economy started to reopen we would see more community transmission and the virus would look for places to spread. That is what happened. The way to prevent that, because prevention is what we need, is to ratchet up testing and tracing. The Government failed to do it in nursing homes originally, and it failed to do it in meat plants.

The Minister of State may have heard of a cluster in a meat plant in our constituency. She might have seen stories in a local newspaper of a bus packed to the rafters with people going to work. This is what is happening. Testing was not being carried out in these areas. I am holding the Government not to my standard but to the standard it set for itself. It has never done 100,000 tests a week. It is only now telling us that it is recruiting staff on the same day it launched a plan on how to live with the virus. That is simply not good enough.

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