Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

At what time yesterday, or whenever, was the Taoiseach made aware of the issue? When was the Minister made aware of it? I compliment The Irish Timesbecause I do not think we would have known about this if it were not for the work of Simon Carswell, Jack Horgan Jones and their colleagues.

The Taoiseach mentioned that it is taking 2.2 days from end to end. The real figure we need to know is how long it is taking in the community. It took considerable journalistic action to find out it is actually 4.1. Every day and every week we need to get the figure for how long it is taking to trace people in the community. How is it in any way sane or sensible to send people text messages? Some people may have Covid or may be in hospital, including in intensive care, for all we know. How can we ask them to contact people? I accept there are pressures, but this is bonkers. It is absolutely ridiculous. We cannot allow this to happen. We had time to deal with this.

For instance, when there were issues previously, the previous Minister called in the Army. Why was this not done? We had an opportunity. From last Friday until today, that is four and a half days, people have been circulating and not contacting people. Covid has spread in multiples that we do not know. As regards contact tracing, it is in the thousands or tens of thousands; we do not know. This happened before but never on this scale.

What is the status of the famous app? How effective is it? I think its effectiveness now is seriously questioned. The HSE has a huge amount to do. I am not saying that Paul Reid and his team are not under pressure, because they are. It is not always about jumping up and down about them. However, could the tracing aspect not be separated from the HSE and done as a different component under another regulatory body? It is not right to have it in charge of regulating itself as regard the accuracy and efficiency of this tracing. We need to know that in a spike such as this we have enough resources and enough people. The public do not mind if the people working on tracing do not have much to do because they will be there in case there is a spike. Will the Government consider a process by which the regulation of tracing will be done separately from the HSE to ensure that we know the figures are accurate, allowing the HSE to do its proper job?

I ask the Taoiseach to reveal when he knew and when the Minister knew. Will he commit that publicly we will get the community end-to-end testing and tracing rates every week from now on?

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