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

I accept that there is a large private pharmaceutical industry and it utilises its laboratories. There is also a state-of-the-art public health apparatus, something we do not have. We have run down our public health apparatus.

A particular strength of the German system is the strength of its local public health apparatus and tracing regime. That is what is needed. Similar success has been achieved in New Zealand, Australia and so on because of the strength of local public health. We need people with local knowledge, resources and respect, which our public health specialists do not have because they are not held in the same status as other medical specialists, and the resourcing to back that up.

We do not need people on miserable contracts. I have the contract in front of me. It is a zero-hour contract, without a shadow of a doubt. It is littered with statements to the effect that the company can get rid of personnel, does not have to pay them in this instance and so on. It scrambled because I embarrassed it last week. I was tipped off by somebody who is on one of these contracts who is absolutely disgusted. Somebody with a postgraduate degree is being treated like this.

It is no wonder we cannot get contact tracers if these are the contracts they are being handed. The suggestion from Deputy Alan Kelly that we should siphon off the system from the HSE is even worse. It is madness. We need people who are directly employed by the HSE on proper contracts in order to build up strong public health teams at a local level, which is what exists in Germany. Was there any detailed discussion about that kind of thing? That is what we need if we are going to get ahead of this virus.

On an elimination strategy or suppression, Dr. David Nabarro was clear, as was Dr. Tony Holohan at the briefing. We have to have that public health apparatus to have a chance of not rolling in and out of restrictions after restrictions time after time. That is the point. Did the Taoiseach learn anything from our European colleagues in that regard?

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