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

In the House on 3 November, I pointed out to An Taoiseach that we need to use Irish data to inform Irish decisions and not continue to rely on NPHET advice, which is based on what the EU health authorities are saying.

On 6 November at a meeting with the Taoiseach, he will recall that I questioned Dr. Holohan, the Chief Medical Officer, on his presentation as to why the rate of decline of Covid-19 infection in Dublin had stalled. While I did not get an answer I specifically stated that we needed to have a further meeting to go into those figures. That did not happen. However, the rate of infection in Dublin continued to stagnate and we now see the same situation being replicated across our country.

Yesterday morning Microsoft announced that it is to create 200 software engineering jobs to support, among other things, cloud services for its global customers. The HSE is one of those customers using its Microsoft dynamics CRM, customer relationship management package. This is a system designed to help companies manage and maintain customer relationships and deliver actionable data. As we speak we have over 500 people working in 11 contact tracing centres inputting large volumes of data every minute on to this system. This data has the capacity to generate reports on who, where and how people are getting infected with Covid-19.

This is information that the Government urgently needs to make the right decisions on how we exit from the current lockdown, allow people to live again, allow businesses to open up and, more importantly, ensure that we do not face a further lockdown. To do that we need to know what this virus is doing in Ireland’s population, which is both geographically and culturally very different to other EU countries.

The Government will make decisions this week on an educated guess, on anecdotal evidence, on partial data but sadly, not with all of the hard, cold facts. It is akin to making up a flatpack kitchen but refusing to look at the instructions. While a bit of putty will cover over any mistakes in making up a kitchen, if this Government and its unaccountable advisers get this wrong, then our children and their children will be paying for it.

Who is interrogating this Microsoft dynamics CRM to generate the data on what is actually happening with Covid-19 in Ireland to provide the evidence for the policy decisions that the Taoiseach’s Government will make later this week?

See this speech in context