Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will answer the Deputy's questions in full. He described what happened over the weekend as an absolute calamity. It is important that the Irish people hear a different response to that, if I may. NPHET met on Thursday and made a recommendation to Government to stay at level 2. On Saturday, the Chief Medical Officer was talking to various people. He decided to call NPHET together on Sunday. He informed me and I informed the Taoiseach. The Chief Medical Officer and I spoke before the meeting. I spoke to him on Sunday rather than Saturday because he had more information on Sunday. When he texted me at around lunchtime on Saturday, the numbers for the day were not in. I was going to talk to him and was better off waiting until he had as much information as possible. The Chief Medical Officer and I spoke. As soon as we spoke, I informed the Taoiseach. NPHET met for many hours. Afterwards, it informed me and we had a long, detailed discussion about the recommendation and why it was made. After that, I informed the Taoiseach. The next morning, the Cabinet Covid committee met. Cabinet met later that day.

We need to be careful with our words because we are asking the Irish people to make many sacrifices to suppress this virus, and I respectfully suggest to the Deputy that the sequence of events I have laid out are a reasonable account of Government and public health teams working through difficult issues over the weekend, at pace, and coming to reasoned conclusions on them. I suggest that that is a more reasonable view of what happened. The Deputy's first question was why I spoke to him on Sunday and I have answered that. I can find out for the Deputy when I saw the letter. It would have been emailed to my private secretary. The Chief Medical Officer, the deputy chief medical officer, the Secretary General and I spoke by video call at approximately 7 p.m., at some length. The letter is a written account of the recommendation. We talked through all of that. I can find out when exactly that letter arrived in my inbox but I imagine it was some time late on Sunday night.

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