Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputies for the questions. I assure them that the vaccination task force and the HSE share the frustration behind the questions. Everyone here is representing their constituents and the questions people are asking them.

I will lay out for Deputy Farrell what we know. We know that on Sunday week, our target is to have vaccinated 140,000 people. That is split 50:50 between long-term residential care and front-line healthcare workers. In long-term residential care, it is the entire nursing home sector. That is 589 nursing homes, residents and staff. In mental health residential care and disability residential care, it is residents over the age of 65. In healthcare, colleagues have rightly raised the question of who are front-line workers and what are the protocols. The HSE has an agreed protocol for who front-line healthcare workers are, both in the hospital system and in the community. I will make sure that is made available straight away to colleagues. It will be 70,000 healthcare workers. On Sunday week, which is a week and a half's time, the first 140,000 people will be vaccinated. We are then cycling back immediately to start the second doses in the nursing homes and with healthcare workers who have had their first dose because that happens on day 22.

The figure I shared earlier with the House, which comes with many caveats around it, is our aim to have 700,000 people or thereabouts vaccinated - most with the first and second dose but some with only the first dose because the second dose would spill into April - in quarter 1, that is, by the end of March. Critically, that covers more or less the first three cohorts. That is the entire long-term residential care sector, staff and residents; about 150,000 healthcare workers in hospital and the community; and almost all of the population over 70 years of age. There are, as colleagues know well, other cohorts who are high risk but by the end of quarter 1, which is just 11 weeks away, those first three cohorts will have covered off a lot of those who are most at risk and those who take care of those most at risk.

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