Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Before this debacle emerged at the weekend, People Before Profit and RISE had already come to the conclusion we needed to move to a higher level of restrictions and that we should pursue a zero Covid-19 strategy. We held that view because after fairly intense discussions with public health and infectious disease experts, they predicted where we are now, with rising infection rates all over the country. They indicated that regardless of what the Government said, we would need to increase restrictions.

I want to get to what annoys me about what unfolded at the weekend. It is the manner in which the Tánaiste and the Government in general tried to trash the Chief Medical Officer and undermine his credibility in a very cynical way when it was clear he was simply offering a view about the need for greater restrictions based on his fears that if those restrictions were not introduced quickly, the health position would deteriorate but so would the social and economic position. Both employment and the wider economic position would become a bigger problem in three weeks if we did not act at that stage.

I point this out because the Tánaiste, in the most cynical way, suggested that the Chief Medical Officer did not give a damn about economic impacts, loss of employment and loss of income. It was the really dastardly part of the attack. The suggestion was that the Chief Medical Officer had no right to say what he did because he would not have to suffer on the pandemic unemployment payment. That is quite ironic from a Tánaiste who is part of the Government, which is cutting the payment. He was pretending it was his concern.

This was fundamentally dishonest because the Tánaiste and the Government knew that the view of NPHET and the Chief Medical Officer, whatever one thinks of it, sought to minimise economic, social and health damage. The Government might not have agreed with that view, and we could have an honest argument about that. Was it not deeply cynical, devious and wrong to try to undermine the Chief Medical Officer in that way or to say he did not have a rationale?

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