Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will return perhaps to the European Council. I completely agree with Deputy Mattie McGrath to the extent that we are an outlier in Europe. We have imposed far greater restrictions on people than any other European state over the past six months consistently, and for what? For a policy that has utterly failed. I appreciate that this is not necessarily the remit of the Department of the Minister of State, Deputy Byrne, but I am sure he will troop through the lobbies and we will roll over all these restrictions without debate. Democratic oversight, parliamentary accountability and so on are key tenets of the rule of law, which we criticise Hungary for not adhering to. When it does not suit us here to adhere likewise for political reasons, we do exactly the same thing. Is Viktor Orbán still in the same European Parliament political group as Fine Gael and the Tánaiste, Deputy Varadkar, or has he left it? In any event the approach Fianna Fáil is adopting is very much at odds with what the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, ALDE, its European family, is advocating, which relates to parliamentary accountability.

I wish to return to the traffic light system. We shut down our aviation and travel sectors and told people they could not go on holidays and told public and civil servants we would penalise them and make them take two weeks' unpaid leave if they did. We did so without any statutory basis which was, I think, entirely unlawful but, ultimately, the Irish courts and I presume the European courts will end up adjudicating on that. In any event it is now proposed, as the Government prepares to lock down society, that we will open up aviation. We could not open up during the summer. We could not even allow people to meet outdoors during the summer, but now it is suddenly safe to meet outdoors. We will open up aviation. I welcome the fact that we are to open it up. We badly need it. We are members of the European Union but we never talk about that as something important other than as a means to say how much better than Boris Johnson we are. We were so proud of how much better than Mr. Johnson we were in our response to Covid until we ended up taking the same knee-jerk reactions but just before he did. Britain does not have the same centralised government structure we have, and now its cities, in particular the northern cities, are fighting back. They are right to do so and to say this is a punishment of the poor, effectively for being poor. If one looks at a map of incidences of Covid-19 and a map of incidences of poverty across Clare, Dublin, Meath or anywhere else on this island, they are essentially the same map, as they are in the United Kingdom and in most other countries.

I want to know one thing in particular. A green system is proposed which requires less than 4% of tests being positive and fewer than 25 positive cases in 10,000 people over the previous week. Notwithstanding all the sacrifices the Irish people have borne, due to the failure of the State's reaction and the failure to set up any sort of tracing system we are far in excess of that, so what will we do about orange and red areas? Will there be testing? What is being done with other members of the European Union to agree a protocol on testing between these countries? If I understand the outcome of the Council correctly, there can be no impediment whatsoever on travel - other than the impediment the Irish Government in its genius dreamt up which said people are free to travel, that freedom of movement is part of the European Union, but those who do so will take two weeks' unpaid leave. The Government says that is not a punishment, a restriction or an impediment. Is "my ass it is not" unparliamentary language?

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