Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I ask the Taoiseach on a regular basis to consider engaging with other party leaders, group leaders and wider society, including health experts and people with expertise from other areas, to consider the development of a strategy intended to minimise the rate of the virus in this country. I frequently make the point that responding to every upsurge with a lockdown or further restrictions is not a strategy. We need to identify those actions and the strategy that will give us the best possible opportunity to minimise the rate of the virus. It is important to bear in mind that business, social and health concerns are different sides of the same coin. The worst thing that could happen our social life and our business life is that the virus gets out of control. All of these issues are connected.

During the summer it was clear that there was concern about international travel. The letter from NPHET in the middle of the summer said that 12% of cases were travel related but it went on to raise alarms about the impact of that 12% in terms of passing on the virus to family groups and other clusters. It was very concerned about it at that stage. It is strange that it has not mentioned it since but we should be listening to what it said during the summer. That was in respect of travel. There was a clampdown on travel followed by monitoring. There were strict requirements to isolate and so on. We now know, however, that there is no system in place. In the first week of September, for example, approximately 60,000 people arrived into this country but less than one fifth of those were contacted with a call to check about contact tracing. There was no monitoring of their movements and no monitoring of compliance. Just last week, the Department of Health confirmed that the locator form and the system of engagement with arriving passengers are not conducted for the purposes of monitoring or enforcement of restricted movement. We now have a system where there is no monitoring at all of anybody coming into this country. The vast majority of travellers coming here are coming from non-green list countries. If we look at what is happening in other countries, there is testing in Germany, for example. In other countries there is a combination of testing with monitoring and quarantining but we have no system here now. That is extraordinary, given the levels of the virus. Why was the policy of trying to monitor people here and setting down clear guidelines changed? There is no monitoring at all at this stage. Will the Taoiseach confirm that there are now no safeguards in place in respect of international travel? What was the reason for that change in policy?

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