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

The prospect of level 5 restrictions for the next six weeks is a pretty grim one. The normal social and human interaction that is the lifeblood of people will be curtailed to a very significant extent. It is, however, necessary for a very simple reason. For any who doubt that, and there are a few, it is necessary for the very simple reason that we cannot put our doctors and front-line health workers in a position where sick people, with Covid-19 or non-Covid related sicknesses, arrive at hospitals where there is no intensive care bed, staff or healthcare provision to look after them and they have to be turned away. That prospect is unthinkable. Whatever one thinks of the handling of the Covid pandemic, we simply cannot put our doctors and healthcare workers or sick people in that position. For this reason, we have no choice but to impose restrictions to try to drive down the infection rate of the virus.

Having said that, I do not agree with the coercive approach the Government is trying to apply, with fines and powers to act against people who the Government deems to be the problem, in sustaining the public health effort. When the first lockdown happened there was overwhelming support for it. There was no need for compulsion. People did it because they knew it was necessary. As difficult as it is, economically, psychologically, socially and in every other way, an overwhelming majority of people will endure the hardship. The subtext or underlying logic of the extension of the coercive measures and fines proposed by the Government was summed up by Deputy O'Dowd when he said the reason we are in this situation was some people's irresponsible behaviour. That is not the reason we are in this situation now. I will give examples of the reasons we are in this situation. The Government is exploiting student nurses because it has not staffed our hospitals properly. We have critically low levels of ICU provision, some of the worst in the western world. We will not properly pay the contact tracers we need to chase down the virus, and we have failed to recruit them. We did not act against the meat processing plants and no fines were issued in that sector. There is whole range of other failings by the Government and, critically, a failure to support people who are seeing their livelihoods hammered by the pandemic. We say we should reward and support people, rather than punishing them.

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