Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is no problem at all.

Ultimately governments are responsible for the decisions they make. That has to be the starting point. I have absolutely no doubt that in time there will be a full and thorough review of what happened. None of us would want the surge that we saw and the subsequent impact it had on the hospitals, ICU and so forth.

Had we or anybody known then what is known now about the prevalence of the UK variant, as well as potentially the South African variant, the public health advice would have been different. I have no doubt that the Government's decisions would have been different, as well as public behaviours. It all would have happened differently.

We did not know about the UK variant until the Friday before Christmas. That was when the UK Government raised an alarm and said it had a problem. We worked right through the weekend with the public health officials. We were back and forth with our counterparts in the UK. By Monday, the Government was shutting down travel between Ireland and the UK, which was completely unprecedented, and recommending moving to level 5. To give the Deputy a sense, the day before that Friday, on the Thursday, the public health advice, which I believe was the right advice based on what was known at the time, was to bring forward level 3. The original plan had been to move to level 3 in early January. They were saying that given the rise in cases, we should move it forward to St. Stephen's Day. The Cabinet sub-committee met on Monday and made a recommendation to the Cabinet without NPHET advice but, in fairness, with CMO advice to move to level 5.

I would be happy now or on another day to compare and contrast the information. There has been much focus on what happened coming into December. The advice was to move to level 3 which we did. There was one area of difference where the advice was to close hospitality. We did open the restaurants. Hospitality was not open. The pubs, hotels and nightclubs were not open but restaurants were. At the same time, the public health advice was to open up households. As the Deputy is aware, we kept no household visits right through to 18 December.

Would 3A versus 3B have made much of a difference? Personally I do not think so. There is an interesting question to ask, namely, whether we should have tried to extend level 5. Might that have worked? My own view, for what it is worth, is that I do not think it would have worked. It would not have been in line with public health advice. The public health advice, if it had been level 5, would not have been in line with what was happening on the ground. People right around the country were very tired. We had just done six weeks of level 5. We had the lowest case rate anywhere in Europe. These are important and real questions which will be examined in a lot of detail in time.

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