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

The Government's failure to follow public health advice is responsible for Ireland having the worst rate of Covid infection in the world. It is responsible for hundreds of tragic deaths and these tragedies were avoidable.

On 26 November, NPHET wrote to the Government and stated, unambiguously, "NPHET therefore recommends that the hospitality sector remain closed ... over the eight-week period". The Government broke with that advice under the pressure of business lobbying and decided to open pubs and restaurants. At the time I said this was a recipe for seeding the virus across Dublin for a couple of weeks and then spreading it throughout the country. The Taoiseach ignored me and other socialist Deputies. Most important, he ignored the public health advice.

With cases then clearly out of control, Dr. Tony Holohan wrote to the Government on 21 December, calling for measures as set out in level 5, including the closure of retail. On 23 December, after a NPHET meeting, he wrote again, calling for the "full suite" of level 5 measures to be introduced. It was not until 31 December that retail was finally closed.

The question is whether the Government will learn any lessons from the disastrous and deadly mistakes it has made so far. Will it finally abandon its failed living with Covid strategy which has resulted in yo-yo lockdowns? Instead of delivering us a fourth and fifth lockdown before we have sufficiency vaccination, will the Government seek to ensure this is the final lockdown by implementing a zero Covid strategy to eliminate community transmission while investing in finding, testing, tracing and isolating to deal quickly with any cases that occur?

Will the Taoiseach agree to ban non-essential travel to Ireland and implement a 14-day mandatory quarantine for those people who must travel here, with all the appropriate safeguards? Preventing the import of the virus has been a crucial approach of those countries that have successfully implemented zero Covid strategies. It is especially important now, given the different strains of the virus.

Will the Taoiseach ensure the recommendation that workers who can work from home are allowed to do so is actually implemented? We have very many reports of workers who are not being allowed to work from home by their employers. When they contacted the Health and Safety Authority, HSA, about it, they were told this is at the employer's discretion. This is simply not good enough. Does the Taoiseach agree that the HSA must be empowered to enforce working from home, and employers who refuse to allow their employees to work from home should be fined?

Will the Taoiseach take action to close the loopholes in the list of essential services, which means that many workplaces closed in the first lockdown have been open in this third lockdown? An example is the national car test centres. I speak particularly about non-essential construction sites, including Intel at Leixlip, that continue to open and put workers in danger. I wrote to the Taoiseach about that on 8 January.

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