Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputies Bríd Smith, Boyd Barrett and Barry.

We are at the beginning of another lockdown, the second. The vast majority of people have adhered to the guidelines. They have made enormous sacrifices of their liberty with financial, family and health implications and they will continue to make them. In some ways a second lockdown was almost flagged. If we are facing a third lockdown in February, the spirit of the people who had made such sacrifices will be broken. There is a limit to what people can do.

This Bill is largely cosmetic. It tries to penalise people for holding house parties and so forth. The powers given to the Garda to fine people and direct people away from particular areas and house parties are largely cosmetic. On the issue of fines as a deterrent, people will be asking where the fines for meat processing plants were. Where were the fines for nursing homes given that 56% of people who have died in this pandemic were residents in nursing homes? Where are the fines for places like those? None of that has been included in this Bill.

In meat processing plants with no social distancing, workers' rights were under threat in respect of getting sick pay and so forth. All that has been thrown in the air with this legislation. As I have said, it is largely cosmetic. There needs to be collective responsibility. The vast majority of people have adhered to the guidelines. The Bill is dangerous and will drive a wedge in the solidarity and the sense that we are in this together. People will now say that we are not all in this together. This is Government policy. We cannot go for a third or fourth lockdown because the Government will lose people; it will lose the dressing room at that stage. This will be completely academic and cosmetic in getting this under control.

Policy is the most important thing. The country has six weeks to change its policy regarding what it is doing at the moment. We cannot go to another stage where we go back to a sense of normality at the start of December and then go back into another lockdown at the end of February. We cannot do that; it will break people. It is imperative now to have a policy change. Testing and tracing are extremely important. Opening the economy was a major mistake in the early summer. We should have crushed the virus with a zero-Covid policy to really get on top of the pandemic. If we do not, we will be in serious trouble. As I said, this is largely cosmetic.

See this speech in context