Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I spoke on 14 May last about contact tracing and said at that time that the HSE was playing with figures. I said the system was not working and that members of Dáil Éireann were being fed "organic fertiliser", that is, manure, about what was going on with contact tracing. I went on to say:

The Government cannot ask people to continue to make such efforts if the truth about the consistent delays in contact tracing and informing people of their results are being hidden from them.

I also said, "we cannot allow, under any circumstance, a second wave of infection". I had no great premonition about what was going to happen but I was looking at the facts as they were being presented to me. I was absolutely speechless when I heard that the HSE has now abandoned its contact tracing system and told people via text message to do their own contact tracing. We are asking older people to click on links they receive in a text message, to download information from a website and to make contact with their close contacts. We are asking people whose mother tongue is not English to do the same. We are asking it of young people, who by their nature are going to have to restrict what they can do significantly if they must take the time to tell their contacts they have been confirmed positive for Covid-19. It is absolutely ludicrous for those three categories and yet the Minister came into the House earlier and defended that decision. This should not come as a surprise to anyone.

Over the last month, I have raised the same issue with the Taoiseach, the Minister for Health, the chief executive of the HSE, the Minister for Education and Skills, the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs and the Minister for Defence. That is a third of the Cabinet. I refer to the scandal whereby existing front-line therapy staff, occupational therapists, physiotherapists and speech and language therapists were involved in contact tracing for the last seven months instead of interfacing with young people who desperately need those services. I ask the Aire Stáit to address that specific issue when she is responding because it affects her constituents and mine, including 1,000 children across Roscommon and Galway. Surely having these therapists doing contact tracing should have set off warning bells across the Cabinet because there was obviously something fundamentally wrong there.

I put a very simple proposal to the Government, which was that current or retired Defence Forces personnel would take over the role of contact tracing. Some 623 former members of the Defence Forces sought to re-enlist to help out during the pandemic and were not taken on board by the Defence Forces for various reasons. They are ideally suited to carry out contact tracing but not one of them was contacted about it. Deputy Berry and I brought an amendment forward on 26 March to ensure the reserve members of the Defence Forces could be used to support the contact tracing efforts. They have not been used.

Yesterday, I got a phone call from a very senior health professional who had been stopped at a Garda checkpoint and asked where he was going. He was travelling to work. There were 14 members of An Garda Síochána on that particular checkpoint. He made the point that that will have absolutely no impact on the spread of this virus, but the skills members of An Garda Síochána have would be very useful in dealing with the contact tracing backlog. It would have been far more useful if they had spent their shift doing the contact tracing for those older people, young people and those whose mother tongue is not English, rather than standing on the side of the road asking people where they were going.

I ask the Aire Stáit to come back to me on this next matter as well. Last June, I wrote to the Minister for Health, the chief executive of the HSE and the Secretary General of the Department of Health pointing out the desperate situation in Portiuncula Hospital in Ballinasloe, where 10% of the beds were lost because of Covid-19. The hospital was very proactive. It put forward two very specific proposals seeking two modular buildings. One would be for an accident and emergency department so it could segregate Covid and non-Covid patients, and the second modular unit would separate the outpatient department from the main hospital, which makes logical sense. It could then convert the old outpatient department into single isolated beds to replace the capacity lost to Covid-19. We still have no indication as to when those facilities will be put in place as we head into the second wave. We are trying to manage a situation in the busiest hospital across the midlands that has 10% less capacity than this time last year and which had many hundreds of patients on hospital trolleys throughout last winter. I hope the Minister of State can respond to that issue.

While we are on the subject of the Minister of State's and my patch, on Wednesday the Taoiseach told us that we had learned from the first phase of the pandemic as regards nursing homes. We have learned very little, given what went on in my constituency yesterday. I know this nursing home well, in fact my late grandmother was a resident, and it has provided an exceptional level of care in that community.

Yesterday, I pointed out to the Tánaiste that while I wanted the issue relating to that nursing home to be addressed, I did not want it to be repeated in any other nursing home in the country, regardless of where it was. A panel needed to be put in place that could deal with the situation instantly when a problem arose. Speaking later, I suggested that we should have a crack squad within our Defence Forces, of medical professionals, cooks and cleaners, that could step in immediately in such circumstances. The difficulty with this nursing home was that 90% of the staff were told on Tuesday evening that they had to isolate for the next 14 days and there were three staff left to run that nursing home the following morning. We needed staff immediately. There was always going to be a challenge with getting agency staff at such short notice. People were not going to rush into a situation such as that.

In this instance, within 30 minutes of that nursing home having issues, there are more than 800 Permanent Defence Force personnel who would be quite willing to provide that service on a short-term basis and they should have been put in place until other medical staffing was put in place. I was subsequently informed by a senior health official and a member of the Government that such a plan is in place and there is a cohort of Defence Forces personnel who can do that, but the Defence Forces have not been asked to establish that crack squad that could go into nursing homes. They had not been asked to do contact tracing as I had requested. The Reserve Defence Forces have not been called up. Why is that the case? The only conclusion that I can come to is that we have senior staff in our health sector who are involved in a face-saving exercise.

We need to remember that the Department of Health has a bigger budget than NASA in the United States. NASA can put a man on the moon and we cannot put two nursing staff into a nursing home in the west of Ireland. We cannot put a system in place so that we can contact people who are positive for Covid-19, find out who their contacts are and make contact with them. This state of the art app that we launched, with significant fanfare, is redundant, because unless the phone call is made to the individual and the pin code from the contact tracing team is given, that app is of no use. We spent hundreds of thousands of euro and had a substantial marketing budget. All of us here and a huge proportion of the population downloaded the app which is now worthless because we cannot get the phone call to get the pin code to release those numbers. The frustrating thing about it is that the most basic requirement of a public health official in this country is to be able to conduct contact tracing. It is their bread and butter. Vaccinations and so on are supplemental to that. That is the one thing that they are all trained to do and our public health management and officials cannot do it seven months after the initial surge. It is unacceptable that that is the case.

I have in my possession an email from a nurse who was so frustrated about the reports in the media last night regarding our local nursing home. She is registered with Ireland On Call. She has worked in nursing homes over the last months during the pandemic and has not been called to do this work. The staff are clearly there but we are not connecting the dots.

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