Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As I mentioned earlier, in the past couple of days we passed the 1 million mark. One million Covid PCR tests have been carried out in Ireland. That is a considerable achievement. Once again, I express my gratitude to and appreciation for the HSE staff and laboratory staff given the work they have done.

We do have mobile testing centres. They can be set up quite quickly. One was set up in Castleknock, in my area, not that long ago. We need to be frank with people in that capacity is not unlimited. There are only so many medical scientists in Ireland and the world. Let us not pretend that capacity can somehow be ramped up infinitely. There may be periods, as we go on, during which the criteria on testing will have to be changed so that we can focus on testing those most likely to test positive. Some 98% of test results are still negative. We need to be frank with people about that.

I had stopped watching the BBC news but started watching it again last night at 10 p.m. to see what was happening with Brexit from the British perspective. I was interested to see that the main item on the news in Britain concerned lines of 300 people, or more, queueing to get a Covid test. Their system, whereby one can bypass one's general practitioner and apply for a test online, is breaking down. That is why we need to be careful about how we proceed from here. Things are not perfect. We are coming up against capacity constraints but we need to make the right decisions. Allowing people to bypass the general practitioner seems to have been a big mistake in Britain, even though some academics here are advocating it. Things that work academically do not always work in practice. We need to make sure the demand is met when it comes to the criteria regarding who qualifies for testing and who does not. We will continue to increase the capacity as much as we can but we need to be frank with people that it is not unlimited and cannot be unlimited.

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