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

We all need to be careful with language and how we describe things. People are not scared to attend screening services. People are not scared to go to hospital and many are going. As we moved into level 5, one of the key objectives was to keep normal health services open. That has been one of the clear differences between this level 5 lockdown, if we call it that, and the first lockdown. That is understandable too because for a lot of people, the whole experience of this virus was that it was new, unprecedented and essentially whole wards were affected and Covid dominated the hospital experience. Yes, there were delays and backlogs have been created because of delays occasioned by the first lockdown. That is the reality but we have to deal with that. That is why an unprecedented allocation of €600 million was given for the winter initiative and the resumption of services and that has been followed through on with a €4 billion allocation - I repeat, a €4 billion allocation - to the health services for 2021, €2 billion of that to deal with Covid and €2 billion to deal with the health service system itself. That will lead to an additional acute bed capacity of over 1,200 beds. It will lead to additional procurement of activity from the private hospitals. It will allow for more intermediate care beds. It will allow for greater additional access to diagnostics for GPs. It will allow for additional community healthcare networks and community specialist teams, particularly for older people and those with chronic disease. All of the national screening programmes have restarted a phased reintroduction of screening services. If we take, for example, BowelScreen, over 39,000 new invitations have been issued, 10,900 sample kits have been returned to the lab and almost 400 patients have been referred for a colonoscopy. These are people who are using the screening services right now and who are responding to the services.

I take the Deputy's point that some people are obviously still afraid of getting Covid. They are right to be afraid of getting it because no-one should want to get Covid because it can damage a person's health. It is not fair to say people are on the television screens every night scaring the life out of people. They are not. It is important to keep the national effort to get the numbers down. The Deputy should look at what is happening on the Continent at the moment. There are real challenges and pressures on ICU beds right across Europe. Thankfully we have been spared that by timely intervention by Government in the form of going first to level 3 and to level 4 in some counties, by restricting household visits and then going into level 5. A combination of all of that has meant that Ireland now has the third-lowest incidence rate in Europe. We should all work together to maintain that low incidence of Covid right through to the end of the month because that will ensure we can retain the bulk of our hospital, community care and primary care capacity for non-Covid illness. It is the most effective way we can do this and we should all row in behind it.

The bulletins are not daily, I think they are twice-weekly. They are important to keep up the level of national awareness and alertness to the dangers of Covid-19.

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