Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I have no doubt that An Garda Síochána will do the job this House assigns it to do but will the Minister rule out asking gardaí to fine a parent visiting his or her child? If parents cannot pay such a fine, will the Minister have him them brought to court? If they will not go to court, a bench warrant will be issued, which An Garda Síochána will have to execute because that is the position of our fines system at the moment. There was recently a District Court enforcement list of 600 cases in Limerick and 400 bench warrants were issued. I do not know whether An Garda Síochána has had the capacity to execute all of those warrants but this is not an efficient use of its time.

There are other policing matters with which the Garda should and needs to be dealing. In effect, we are assigning the Garda to seek to compensate for the failings of our testing and tracing system and our health response. We had moved away from that. In every area, we had agreed that deficiencies in health, matters of health and personal autonomy, which is an essential part of health, were not the appropriate subject matter of policing.

I welcome the Sinn Féin amendments for the simple reason that they require the Minister to bring the regulations he is going to make before the House. In the event that he is not going to accept the amendments, I ask the Minister to clarify that when he is talking about events, he is talking about parties involving large numbers, raves and, heaven forbid, benchings, and not about a parent visiting a child or someone dropping in to a neighbour to make sure he or she is okay as we head into the winter.

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