Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I trust the Minister will come in for the remainder of this debate. Before the break, I was saying we would be much better off concentrating on building solidarity through clear messaging because the messaging has been very weak so far. It is really important to bring the public along with any new restrictions to ensure they see that there is a logic to those, that they are reasonable and that there is a basis for introducing them rather than just guesswork.

The main way to build solidarity is by providing political leadership in this and the Government being seen to play its part fully. Regrettably, that has not been the case in recent times, most notably in respect of all the promises on testing and tracing. This was the mainstay of the Government plan and at no point has that system was worked properly or to the extent that was required. What happened last week on tracing is very regrettable. It is very hard to understand why people in government seem to have been taken by surprise about that. This was flagged very clearly two weeks ago by Dr. Anne Dee when she talked about the pressures on public health staff who were doing the tracing. It has been flagged for a long time that public health has been a very neglected area. Many people did not even know it existed until the pandemic broke out. That is some time ago now. We know that the sector has been under-resourced. It is critical at all times, but especially during a pandemic.

Then one must ask why staffing levels in public health are so poor. We have about a third of the number of public health doctors that are required and which other countries of comparable size have. Why have we not increased the staffing numbers since then? Why is there no such thing as a public health consultant? Some of these things were referred to in the budget but the Irish Medical Organisation told the Joint Committee on Health yesterday that no progress has been made on those at all and there has been no engagement. Is it any surprise that the tracing system runs into difficulties when the service is so under-resourced? A report published last year showed that we were 700 public health nurses short of the recommended level. They play such a critical role at community level in public health generally as well as the response to Covid. Not only have we not made any movement in increasing the numbers by the recommended 700 posts, but there are about 40 fewer public health nurses than there were at the start of the year. At the start of the year, our under-supply of critical care beds was identified. Even after the big-spending budget, where there was a complete lack of ambition in increasing the critical care beds to a recommended level, at the end of next year there will still be about 200 critical care beds short of what had been recommended prior to Covid, indeed that which was recommended ten years ago. Is it any wonder that people get cynical and ask why the Government is not playing its part in those critical areas? Last March, the Minister was given the power to introduce regulations concerning foreign travel, for example, but the situation has got progressively worse since then, with no effective monitoring. We started with some level of monitoring but there has been none in the past couple of months. There are no safeguards at all in travel. I was interested when I heard the Minister on the radio this morning when he spoke on this and spoke of introducing a system to self-isolate for five days and then introduce a PCR test for people travelling from red list countries. What has the Minister been doing in recent months? When are we likely to have any kind of safeguards at airports? That is why people ask "Why should I do this if the Government does not play its part?" That is the fundamental message from this. The Government was given an opportunity to play its part across a range of areas but, regrettably, it has been found short in what it has managed to do.

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