Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. I welcome the constructive suggestions that have come from the Labour Party in recent weeks. He is right; neither the Government, the Opposition, any government, NPHET nor any expert has got everything right when it comes to managing this pandemic. What we all hope is that when this is over we will have been seen to have got most things right most of the time. I know the Deputy does not like the term zero Covid. Labour is proposing a different strategy, which is that of aggressive suppression. I think that is a term that is often used in Australia to describe the strategy in some states there. We do need to move away from slogans to the actual detail as to what different strategies mean. As I mentioned yesterday, if one asks supporters or advocates of zero Covid, it means different things to different people. For some people it is a long, hard lockdown to get to zero community transmission for 14 days in a row. For others, one does not have to get to zero at all; it is just about best endeavours to get there. For some, it is all about mandatory hotel quarantine at ports and airports. For others, it is about lots of other things. I agree with some things such as aggressive test, trace and isolate, mass antigen testing and others I do not agree with such as a de facto hard Border between North and South, preventing people from moving north and south or turning some of our Border counties into buffer zones. However, I do think there needs to be a detailed debate and discussion on these issues. We need to talk about the practicalities and we also need to talk about the pros and cons. Nobody should enter any discussion or debate on these matters by ruling out any strategy or dismissing or rejecting any proposals or suggestions. That is very much my approach and that of the Government.

As Deputy Kelly will be aware, our strategy now is to get Covid levels down. We want to get numbers down as low as is possible. I do not know how low that is, but as low as is possible between now and 5 March. That then will allow us to click back in with our testing and contact tracing to keep a handle on the virus so that it does not slip out of our control once again. In that period, we do want to bring about the phased reopening of schools, starting with children with special and additional needs, for reasons that people understand. During that period as well, we are cracking down very severely on international travel. International travel is already down 97%. We already require people entering the country to have a negative PCR test result. If they do not have that, they will be subject to mandatory hotel quarantine. People coming from high-risk countries such as Brazil and South Africa are going to be subject to mandatory hotel quarantine whether they have a negative test result or not. It is our intention to expand that, as we develop the capability and capacity to do so. We do not have that now, but we are building it up and it will allow us to extend mandatory hotel quarantine more widely as the weeks go on.

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