Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

In fairness, the Leas-Cheann Comhairle did provide the Minister with some time to respond but he did not use it. That was the way I saw it.

I want to focus my contribution on the issue of travel restrictions onto the island and into the State. At the outset I want to highlight that in our opinion the checks at our ports and airports today are wholly inadequate and have been since March. I welcome the announcement last night that a negative or not detected PCR test would be required for people arriving from all countries. That is an extremely late development but nevertheless it is an improvement.

Since last March Sinn Féin has been asking the Government to bring in strict checks and controls at our points of entry but successive Governments have resisted it at every opportunity. Month after month various spokespersons, myself included, have asked for airport testing, a robust passenger locator form and follow-up and it has not happened. As a result of that our points of entry have become a weak point in the national effort against Covid-19. We were forever getting lectures about the nature of testing, false negatives, false positives and the assessments that were being conducted of testing regimes but we had no action until we had 6,000 cases a day. That is a bad way to do policy.

The truth of the matter is that the measures announced last night should have been introduced a long time ago. If we were to listen to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, ECDC, we should have introduced them when the numbers were low. That is when checks and controls at our ports and airports are increasingly effective and important. That said, while the new PCR testing requirement is extremely late in the day it is welcome but more needs to be done. Foreign travel must be restricted to only those cases that are essential at this time.

Sinn Féin firmly believes that testing post-arrival should be mandatory as the current voluntary system is insufficient. All the Minister has to do is listen to himself and his Government colleagues in respect of what he said about a pre-departure test. He said that a single negative PCR test, whether taken prior to travel or on arrival, does not exclude the presence of disease due to the incubation period. That was true then; it is true now. I appreciate that there are additional regulations in respect of quarantine but in truth they are not being implemented. We do not have a monitored quarantine or self-isolation regime. We do not have adequate follow-up on our passenger locator form. When I submitted to the transport committee that only 18% of people received a follow-up call for their passenger locator form NPHET queried it and I had to show it that it was the Minister's Department that confirmed those statistics. It is wholly inadequate. We need a post-arrival PCR test. We need monitored and rigorously tracked and traced follow-up of the passenger locator form or we will continue to have a weakness at our ports and airports.

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