Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The most pressing and urgent issue that we face on a shared island basis at this moment is the threat of Covid-19. The scenes in the North last night of ambulances lining up outside hospitals and massive overcrowding in the emergency departments because of Covid-19, frankly, had fairly alarming echoes of what happened in Italy early this year. That is a warning. Already, there are signs that in Border counties the high infection rate is spilling over. The parties in the Executive and the Government here should reconsider the importance of pursuing, on an all-island basis, a common, united strategy of eliminating community transmission, rather than the neither one thing nor another approach which is inevitably going to lead to further spikes and lockdowns.

I draw the Taoiseach's attention to a motion tabled by Solidarity-People Before Profit calling on the World Trade Organization, WTO, to follow the request of India and South Africa to waive intellectual property rights and patents in relation to the sharing of vaccine technology to the world's poorest countries, 25% of whom we are informed today will not have access to the vaccine by the end of the year, which could completely undermine the global vaccine programme.

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