Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

Briefly, to respond to a question asked me by the Taoiseach in the last set of questions, where he suggested that it was not clear to him whether I was in favour of a university model for nurses or not, to be clear I am absolutely in favour and am opposed to the big exploitation of student nurses which is currently going on. We would not be talking about that or the Taoiseach would not be talking about investigating it were it not for the organisation of the student nurses and Solidarity-People Before Profit bringing forward our motion.

I will also re-ask a direct question to the Taoiseach, given that he accepts that fourth year students do work. Does he think that they should be paid more than they currently are? Does he accept that they are currently paid less than the minimum wage and should be paid at least the living wage?

How much money was spent on EY’s analysis and how much did it cost the State? Why did this Government feel it necessary to pay for an outside group of private consultants when we have public health experts? Surely, we have public health experts who are capable of analysing these figures and if not surely we should be investing in building that public health capacity as opposed to outsourcing it in the future.

Finally, after the Government paid for that advice, why did it not take EY’s advice on restaurants, in particular? If one looks at slide No. 27, it has a section which draws on US research from Stanford University and talks about places of interest, POI, categories ranked in decreasing order of associated additional infections. The number one worst category for Covid-19 infections was full-service restaurants. This is for obvious reasons because people are inside and there is airborne transmission so why then reopen restaurants contrary to the underlying data?

See this speech in context