Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

Yes, unless Deputy Boyd Barrett comes back in, which I believe is unlikely. He sends his apologises. He had to go because of the change of the slots.

The Government's plan is called Living with Covid. It would be better off renaming it the yo-yo strategy because that is the truth about what it offers to people with its plan. It offers a future of yo-yoing in and out of lockdown until a vaccine is found. It offers a year, two years or longer of going in and out of lockdown repeatedly. That is what its strategy is, and it is an absolute nightmare for people. The Government is going to come under sustained political pressure to give up that strategy and adopt an alternative, a zero-Covid strategy. I argue for a zero-Covid strategy with socialist policies to ensure ordinary people do not pay the price for it. I will outline later some aspects of such a strategy.

Blunder after blunder by the Government has put us into the current circumstances, whereby people are facing six weeks of lockdown and its impact. The most recent blunder, for which the Government has gotten off lightly in this House, is the one made two and half weeks ago. The decision made to ignore the public health advice was scandalous. It is a decision whose consequence will be people dying; that is the unfortunate truth. It is a decision with the consequence of more damage to the economy and further outbreaks in nursing homes. In this regard, consider the difference between the figures when NPHET was first saying we needed to go to level 5 and that a graduated response would not work and the figures when the Government moved. With regard to almost every single metric, the figures more than doubled, including the incidence rate per 100,000 members of the population and the number of outbreaks in nursing homes. The number of cases in nursing homes now is far more than double that from the preceding two weeks.

The Financial Timeshas published a series of graphs in the past week. All the evidence shows that if damage to the economy is to be limited, the virus needs to be dealt with and the number of cases needs to be reduced to zero, if possible. Moreover, if there are cases, they need to be tracked and traced so the system will not be overwhelmed. The impact of the Government's approach is to cause more damage to people's livelihoods, mental health and the economy generally. That is the most recent blunder but there are others, such as in the summer, when the Government sped up the reopening of the economy under pressure from private-sector lobbyists and Fine Gael, including Deputy Varadkar, who was trying to look good before handing over to the current Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin. It was a huge mistake, a blunder of incredible proportions involving the turning of a blind eye to what was happening in the meat plants and not introducing sick pay.

It is so clear this week that the time was wasted. Unfortunately, this is not the first wave of a pandemic this Government has faced. This is the second wave but the time was wasted. Plans were not made and resources were not put in place to ensure we could avoid a repetition. This is so obvious where contact tracing is concerned. When the virus gets out of control, with a very high incidence rate as a result of government decisions, the tracing infrastructure collapses. What happened over the summer was that the number of people employed to do tracing was reduced. We did not put the resources in place; instead, there was an attempt to employ people on zero-hour contracts, with no sick pay, as contact tracers. When this was revealed by Deputy Boyd Barrett, whom I am sure would have spoken about it, it was regarded as a mistake all of a sudden and it was said that there was never meant to be a zero-hour contract. This is incredible.

At the heart of a proper plan to deal with the coronavirus is a first-class mechanism for finding, testing, tracing, isolating and offering support. When a second wave hits, it should not be the case that our tracing infrastructure is completely overwhelmed and people with coronavirus are left in a situation where they are meant to contact their own contacts. It is completely unacceptable and demonstrates that the Government did not put the plans in place. The Government responds by saying there were so many cases that it was inevitable that we would be overrun. It is the same Government that chose to ignore the public health advice of NPHET over two weeks earlier, thus leading to the circumstances I have described, and did not put resources in place in terms of contact tracing.

The problem is that even when the tracing infrastructure is working at its best, it is still completely inadequate. Based on the best examples around the world, there is a need to be able to trace backwards to find out where people got the disease and identify the super-spreader events, which are a big part of the spread of coronavirus. When it is working at its best, the tracing mechanism in Ireland looks back only 48 hours from the point when a person's symptoms arise. Therefore, we need far more investment in finding, tracing, testing, isolation and support mechanisms to ensure we do not have more disasters of the kind we saw this week.

Many people around the country are hearing the unfortunate news about the events in the nursing home in Galway yesterday and the one in Westmeath today, and they are wondering what nursing home they will hear about in the news tomorrow. They fear a repetition of the horrific stories we heard a number of months ago, involving the majority of nursing home residents and staff contracting coronavirus and not getting adequate support.

Why is it the case that the lessons were not learned? Why were contingency plans not put in place to avoid this? Why has the HSE been recruiting nurses from nursing homes to other areas of the health service? Why is it that most agency workers still do not have access to sick pay, meaning that, understandably, in addition to the obvious reason that people will not go into a nursing home because of the coronavirus, they cannot afford to get sick either? Why do we still have this patchwork of private for-profit nursing homes throughout the country?

I want to make a point on the argument for a zero-Covid strategy and an argument to avoid the recurring lockdowns that the Government offers us. The Government has chosen, and the Taoiseach on Monday night chose, to misrepresent what zero Covid is. He said it is about getting rid of Covid altogether and that it is completely utopian. It is about eliminating community transmission, which is the transmission we cannot trace because we do not know where it came from. There is a very good quote from Professor Susan Michie of University College London:

I could use the analogy of fires. In Ireland ... there is a zero fire policy, which means we want no fires and we take every measure we can to ensure, as much as we can, that there are no fires. However, we know fires will occasionally break out and we have systems in place to jump on those fires quickly so they do not spread into the awful examples we saw in Australia last year arising from large forest fires. That is what elimination and zero-Covid means.

To do this, we need to be able to quarantine and isolate people when they come into this island and we need to massively invest in our track, trace, isolate, support and find mechanism. We also need to invest in our ICU and health capacity generally, in particular, public health. We need to invest in building a national health service. We need to incorporate, and not rent, the private hospitals, take them into public ownership and bring them into a national health service. We also need to provide supports for people. I thought it was striking during the week that the repressive powers are being extended until next year but the ban on evictions is being stopped on 13 December. The Government needs to provide supports for people in terms of the pandemic unemployment payment, small businesses, evictions and a moratorium on mortgage payments to enable people to do what they want to do.

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