Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I accept Deputy Naughten's point about the need for research to inform future actions. With regard to the tools and what is being done in Europe, in many ways we have been ahead of what many European countries have been doing in dealing with the second wave. When I met with EU Heads of State and other Prime Ministers, what they were calling lockdown was our level 3, which was the closure of the hospitality sector. Some countries are just about doing that now, whereas four or five weeks ago we were dealing with that in the hospitality sector. The hospitality, aviation and travel sectors have been the hardest hit with regard to employment and the people in those industries. I am conscious of that. Equally, there are no magic solutions to this. The basics stay the same. I was reminded recently by someone who had seen advertisements around the 1918 flu that they were quite similar to the basic advice being given to people in 2020 for this pandemic: social distancing, avoiding congregation and cough and sneeze etiquette. Fundamentally, it is about human behaviour in prevention of this virus. Our geographical location is a bit more problematic than New Zealand for stopping the spread of the virus. We have a border, we have a very close relationship with the UK with travel, and with the rest of the EU, and this is problematic also in containing and having a zero-Covid approach, which would be very difficult indeed.

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