David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Teachtaí Ó Laoghaire and O'Reilly. I accept the reason the Minister must leave. It has been a long day and we have been discussing a number of different issues. I hope the Minister listens carefully to what the members of the group he is meeting have to say. That is an important issue, and they are quite sore about the fact that the tribunal has been created and put in place, in their view without proper consultation with them. It is appropriate that the Minister meets the group and also listens carefully and acts on what the members say.

There have been a number of opportunities over the last few days to discuss the Government's strategy for how to live with the virus. We have done that in the context of different legislative measures that have been brought forward and motions relating to extending emergency powers to the Minister for Health, the sunset clauses that give him those powers for certain periods and, for most of today, the fines that will be associated with the regulations the Minister will introduce.

We have had plenty of opportunity to discuss many issues but the big question people are asking is what the strategy is to get us out of this crisis. We are now in a six-week lockdown, which could possibly go on longer. What happens when we come out of lockdown? Do we open up for a few weeks and then is it the case that in January or February we go back into level 4 or level 5 restrictions? Are we on a wheel of constant lockdowns which are then lifted and the period between the lockdowns and their lifting shortens as opposed to lengthens? That concerns people. They want to know what the plan is and what we can do to get out of this cycle.

I speak as a member of the Opposition. There is a personal responsibility on each and every one of us. When I make asks of the Government and when I criticise it for what I see as lapses in its duty of care or failures in policy, I also accept that each and every one us has a responsibility to play our part in reducing the spread of the virus. Each and every one of us has to look to ourselves and check and recheck that we are doing all of the basic things that are required of us. That includes handwashing, the cough etiquette and wearing a mask. I encourage people as best I can to do all of that and to abide by those guidelines. Equally, when we are asked to keep socially distant, to limit our interactions with people and keep our social contacts to a minimum, I also accept that has to be done and we have to abide by all of the advice. I am under no illusions whatever that a big part of this State's and this island's ability to wrestle back control of the virus rests on us as individuals, but it also rests on the Government and Government agencies have a part to play.

In recent weeks, a number of parties in this House, including my party, voiced criticism of the Government. Sometimes when the Government is criticised, its reaction is that it is always Sinn Féin. It blames Sinn Féin and talks about my party as if we are the only ones who are pointing out the Government's problems. We have an obligation to hold the Government to account, but we are not alone in pointing out the failure in the testing and tracing system. We do not do it just because we want to attack the Government, nor do we do it because we are trying to undermine the work people in the various areas are doing. We point out failures that are fairly evident, that are factual and that are coming to us from people who work within the system. In recent months, we got calls from very senior people in the system, but also from testers and tracers who told us that there were not enough staff and that there was not sufficient capacity in the system. Teachta O'Reilly informed us again today of more problems with a lack of staff in one of the testing facilities over the weekend. These are very serious issues, yet time and again, not only have our calls to the Government to act and to put the capacity in place fallen on deaf ears, but we have got pushback and been told that we are playing politics and not being honest about the extent of the problems. We are. The problems were real and the Government failed to use the summer months to invest in testing and tracing. That was a mistake and it has cost us.

We also said that we have to watch what is happening in nursing homes. We cannot prevent the virus going into every single institutional setting and of course when the virus spreads there is the possibility that it can go into nursing homes. It is a concern when in one nursing home, for example, almost all of the residents and staff have contracted the virus. There have been many more outbreaks in recent weeks because the older people who live in nursing homes are vulnerable and are most susceptible to contracting the virus. We must do everything we possibly can to ensure these people are kept safe. There were reports from one nursing home that the support that was sought did not come in time. Again, that information is not coming from the Opposition but from the people who work in the home. This is another failure on top of the failures we had in nursing homes in the past. This is another area that we have to get right.

I am not one who says that we can get to zero Covid. Others in the House have different views on that. However, from the get-go, everybody with an ounce of sense knew that if we want to get as close as possible to zero Covid, we should aim to reduce it to the lowest rate we possibly can. That is a laudable objective. To do that, one has to get it right at the airports yet, as we speak today, we still have no testing at airports. That is despite all of the promises, commitments and talk. Again, that is not the Opposition's fault but the Government's fault.

Before he left, the Minister for Health spoke about hospital capacity, specifically ICU capacity, although he did not mention inpatient beds and acute beds, which are also important. Many of the beds that were promised were not delivered or were doubly counted, as sometimes happens during the spin that goes with budgets. The Minister is correct when he says we cannot magic up ICU beds and that they require specialist staff to make sure they are operational. That is all the more reason he should have heeded the call from Sinn Féin and others in opposition and, more importantly, from those on the front line in hospitals – consultants and managers – who said as far back as May, June and July that we should plan to put in the capacity then because it takes time. However, that did not happen. That is the wasted summer and wasted opportunity that we talk about. Had the Government heeded the advice, those ICU beds would have been in place when the second surge came, which is right now, and we would be in a much better position. It is not that we want people to be in ICU because obviously the plan is to bring the numbers down. The issue was to have capacity so that if and when a second wave came, our hospitals would be able to withstand it as best they could, but that capacity was not put in place. Again, that was not the fault of the Opposition.

When the Minister referred to ICU beds, he left out acute beds. Every time he talks about additional beds, it is in the context of opening up beds in existing hospital wards in existing hospital infrastructure. The Minister of State, Deputy Butler, comes from the same constituency as me. I spoke to the hospital manager in University Hospital Waterford last week about the 1,146 additional hospital beds that were promised by the Government. I asked how many we could get in the hospital in Waterford. She said none, because she does not have the physical space to open any more beds. What we need are rapid-build modular units or more physical infrastructure. Many hospitals in this State have old wards, what used to be called Nightingale wards, that are not fit for purpose and where the space is not available. We talk about opening up beds and we provide funding to do that in current spending, but no money is provided for capital expenditure to expand physical infrastructure or even rapid modular builds. We are not really being entirely honest about what is possible and what can be delivered.

I use Waterford as an example because it is the regional hospital for the south east. I also know from speaking to the hospital manager there that pressures in the hospitals in Tipperary, Kilkenny and Wexford, due to a lack of ICU and acute bed capacity, resulted in patients being referred in record numbers into University Hospital Waterford, which put pressure on it. That is all the more reason the regional hospitals and the specialist hospitals have to get additional capacity but that did not happen.

The overall response to the crisis is that it is like baking a cake. There are lots of different ingredients, such as those I spoke about, for example, testing and tracing, doing more at airports, making sure we put capacity into hospitals and people taking personal responsibility, but the lack of an all-island approach is the one big missing piece of the jigsaw that we are not getting right. As I said to the Minister, we have a memorandum of understanding between the North and South. The Minister quite rightly put it back on my party when he said we are in the Executive in the North and we need to do more. We have done everything possible within the Executive to argue with others for more all-island responses, but the memorandum of understanding that was signed was between the Minister for Health, Deputy Donnelly, and the Minister of Health in the North, Mr. Swann. They need to make sure that what was signed up is delivered upon, strengthened and advanced because that has not happened. We did not even deliver what was signed up to and agreed, never mind trying to strengthen it. We have very little co-operation on testing and tracing and travel. How in God's name are we going to have a response on an all-island basis that allows us to wrestle back control of the virus and get ahead of it if we do not operate on an all-island basis? That is my point. All of these things are important. They are all of the ingredients.

I hope that when the Minister looks back at the Official Report of this debate he will note the wonderful presentations made and he will act on some of the advice given.

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