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

His office has informed me that he will do that today. I cannot answer the Deputy's second question regarding whether public health departments have been contacted, but I am sure they have been. We all appreciate the amazing work the public health departments are doing in contact tracing. They have had the assistance of people who would never have known what contact tracing was until recent months but who were trained to do exactly that, including members of the Defence Forces. It is important that they are properly resourced.

As the number of cases increases and the number of contacts people have also increases, contact tracing becomes all the more difficult. That is why we are asking people to minimise the number of social contacts they have, because that will make the job easier for contact tracers. If most of us have two, three or four social contacts, that makes the job of a contact tracer much easier than if we have 20, 30 or 40 social contacts. That is part of the rationale behind encouraging people to avoid gatherings and limiting the size of gatherings that people can have.

In relation to Monday night, I did not say I heard it from a media leak. I never said that. If that is the impression the Deputy got, that is the impression she got, but it is not something that I have ever claimed. I set out the timeline earlier in response to Deputy Doherty. It is how many of the public heard, though, and that caused fear, anxiety and panic for hundreds of thousands of people who thought they might be out of work the next day and for tens of thousands of businesses that thought they might have to close for the last time. It should not have happened in that way and that is not the way things were handled in the past. I totally agree with the Deputy, however, that the events of Sunday and Monday, all of them, are a distraction from what we now need to do, which is to fight the coronavirus together. The Government, the Opposition, the HSE, NPHET, the Department of Health and everybody must work together against this common enemy. That is what I want to do.

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