Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister. I would greatly appreciate that being furnished to us and getting some timeline. I have also had numerous queries from, as he mentioned, carers, pharmacists and part-time fire brigade personnel, who have a huge issue because they are attending home fires and accidents on roadsides and have not been offered the same as the elderly and undertakers. I suppose there is a clatter of them out there.

AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals is a registered company in Ireland and has headquarters in the Liffey valley area of Dublin. Has the Taoiseach spoken to the CEO of the company to establish when Ireland will obtain the vaccines? If not, why not? Surely Irish citizens deserve answers. The time for allowing EU bureaucrats to dictate when an elderly Irish citizen gets vaccinated has passed, and this is beyond incompetence on the part of the Government. This is an extremely serious situation and leadership must be shown. Are the delays due to the EU being slow to place an order? Given that the AstraZeneca vaccine is only a tenth of the price of others available, why did the EU hold off on ordering? It now looks like Northern Ireland and Great Britain are most likely to be back to some kind of normality in the next three to six months, way ahead of the Irish Republic. We have people coming in. I raised this issue a number of months ago with the then Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, and asked that he make sure that PCR tests were done in the airports, and that was denied to me. Now we are talking about an all-Ireland approach. The sad thing is that in Northern Ireland they cannot agree among themselves, so I cannot understand how we will get some kind of agreement with the Northern Ireland Government. However, we certainly could have controlled our own airports and we failed to do so month after month. It is not a matter of stopping people coming in here; it is making sure they have PCR-----

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