Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is mystifying that Covid-19 has not been a notifiable disease from the outset. I commend my comrade, Deputy Louise O'Reilly, for bringing forward the Bill. Deputy O'Reilly has been on the case since early summer, when we first realised this had been overlooked by the Government. We are nine months into this pandemic, long enough to have conceived and given birth to a baby, yet testing and tracing is still not optimal and public health doctors are so badly treated that they have had to threaten to go on strike. Last night, the Government voted against the payment of student nurses who have been to the forefront during this pandemic, we have the lowest hospital consultant rate in the OECD and we are still only starting to trial testing at airports. We have highly regarded experts in infectious diseases on the island but a private auditing company, Ernst and Young, is doing the epidemiology. I do not know how much it will charge us for that yet, but it will be interesting to see.

We have a novel virus involved in a pandemic and it is not notifiable, which is extraordinary. As a consequence, to take an example that is bizarre but legal, the meat plant owners, who are very wealthy in most cases, are not required by law to notify the State if their employees, who are very poorly paid for the most part, have Covid-19. The rest is the story of two lockdowns, or three and a half lockdowns in north Kildare. We have had 2,075 deaths and more than 73,000 cases of Covid and counting.

If Fine Gael in particular had given the same attention to the notifiability of Covid-19 as it gives to Sinn Féin, we might not be having this debate. This disease would be long ago notifiable. That it is not exposes the Government's priorities, which are public relations over public health. Perhaps making the disease notifiable would have required real action to protect workers at the expense of the public optics that protect nothing but private profit in the end. It would have signified and demanded real concern for the low paid and the poor conditions in which they are forced to work.

During the lockdown, I dealt with people who are working in the meat factories in Kildare and the stories were horrendous. I did my best to help them and to improve their working conditions. I have been dealing with the union since then but it highlights the need for adequate protections and guaranteed sick pay for those workers. With regard to all these things, too many workers see and experience them only by their absence. That is when they realise what is happening. When it comes to Covid-19, the notifiability is noted by its absence. Increasingly, those who suffer as a result of that absence of notifiability are notifying the Government of their dissatisfaction and are refusing to take any more guff and neglect.

I am pleased the Minister of State will not be opposing this legislation. I hope it will quickly pass Committee Stage because we are nine months into this pandemic. It is unbelievable that in the middle of a pandemic this is not a notifiable disease.

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