Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Before asking my questions, I wish to say that my thoughts today are with the victims and survivors who passed through our mother and baby homes.

I will speak and leave the Minister with a few questions. The first matter of two that I wish to focus on is that of travel. The Minister knows how strongly I felt about a proper regime of testing and follow-up contacts in respect of people travelling to this country. The requirement for a PCR test within 72 hours in advance of travelling is a welcome step, but it is nowhere near enough. The Government has bottled this in a major way. One of our first interactions with the Minister was on this matter at a testy meeting of the Covid committee in early autumn. Along with others, I believed even then that we had lost so much time.

Even though many horses have bolted from many stables on this, will the Minister consider bulking up and providing a regime that includes quarantining in hotels and a follow-up test within a couple of days upon arrival? If we do that along with what the Minister has bought in, people will feel much safer and it will get us somewhere to where we need to be. I do not hold out much hope but the facility at Dublin Airport is a private testing facility in the long-term car park. According to anecdotal evidence from north county Dublin over the past number of weeks, it was used by as many locals as people travelling into this country. I tabled a parliamentary question seeking breakdown of who used it in terms of people who are travelling in and who are locals. That data are not available, which is really disappointing.

The second issue I wish to discuss is workers. Over recent weeks, as the spread of the virus has intensified, health workers have been left truly in the dark over how many of their colleagues have tested positive for Covid-19. The Health Protection Surveillance Centre, HPSC, has produced weekly reports to give health workers and their union representatives a fuller understanding of the infection rates. The last of these reports was published on 23 December. Since then, there has been a deafening silence.

We are in a crisis and these workers are going over and above. They are stretched beyond belief and at absolute capacity. The old saying comes to mind that when we look back on this - when we do is up for question but we will get through it - and think about what our health workers are going through right now we will need to remember, to borrow the phrase, that never in the field of the Irish health service will so many of us owe so much to so few because that is what it feels like in terms of how our health workers are operating at the moment. They are stretched and there is no data they can work off to know how many of their colleagues are sick. It was reported today that in the health service, close contacts of people in the who tested positive had to come into work to fill the gap.

This is a pandemic and a crisis; I understand that. Will the Minister, however, ask the HPSC to publish this data again regularly? Does he know how many staff have been affected in this latest wave and how many are out sick, or worse? Will he provide an update on the plan and promise in budget 2021 to hire 16,000 additional healthcare workers? Where is that at and how is it progressing?

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