Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Sinn Féin amendments, which I will support. I thank Deputy Cullinane and his party for tabling them. I endorse what Deputies Howlin, Shortall and Bríd Smith have said. I hope none of them takes offence at my endorsement.

I will take this opportunity to ask the Minister a specific question and I would welcome an answer to it. We are allowing the Minister to define a dwelling event, the holding of which will be a criminal offence punishable by law. I would put question marks over the constitutionality of that measure. They are no more than question marks, but I believe the provision needs to be teased out. At the very least, an event is an event. A rave or the benching of a judge might constitute an event but a friend visiting a friend, a grandparent visiting a grandchild or a child visiting a parent is not an event by any stretch of language. It may be contrary to public health advice, at least if precautions are not taken, but it is not an event. Will the Minister clarify that he will not seek to impose fines in respect of the normal daily occurrences which I have just described? For the avoidance of doubt, I am talking about a friend visiting a friend or a parent visiting a child. These are not events. It is an abuse, if not of the Constitution, then certainly of language and of the political process for the Minister to seek to bring a Bill before the House to declare these actions to be a criminal offence. I am not saying that it is not contrary to public health advice or that such advice should not be followed, but we are talking about criminal offences.

I will return to the issue of public health advice, which has been raised. As Deputy Boyd Barrett stated, this is about punishing breaches of public health advice. The Minister has portrayed all of this as being driven by public health considerations. We have public health advisers on the one hand and the Government on the other. The Government says that the advisers tell it what to do and that it does it while not influencing the advisers in any way. I was, therefore, really concerned by the comments of the chairman of NPHET which suggested that we should not concentrate so much on the absolute and utter shambles of a tracing system we have because it could not possibly deal with the number of cases we have and because these measures are needed. Was that public health advice? Was the chairman speaking as a member of NPHET or as a servant, agent or official of the Department of Health, who answers to the Minister, to absolve the Department and the health authorities of their obligations to follow public health advice? I have never heard anybody suggest anything other than that testing and tracing is key. It has been repeated for months, by a committee of which the Minister was a member before he took office, that our tracing system is not working.

We can seek to criminalise the poor for being poor. It will not work because our fines system does not work. We can give An Garda Síochána the job of handing out these notices. I have no doubt but that it will do the job this House assigns to it.

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