Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

It was very interesting to listen to our friend from Limerick and our friends from Kerry speaking about the Labour Party motion. They reminded me of the missionary priests who used to come to Mallow when I was a boy in the 1980s. Those priests would preach fire, damnation and brimstone and engage in fine rhetoric. I am not sure the Deputies' rhetoric was so fine but there was plenty of it. However, there was very little enlightenment at the end of it all and I often wondered if it was more about spectacle than substance. None of the Deputies to whom I refer have spent a day in government and they never will because they would run a mile from it. I doubt any one of them would have the backbone or the courage to go into government or to spend one day inside Government Buildings. I think the Healy-Raes were in there for a little while all right but they ran out as quick as lightning. It is fine to preach when in opposition . It is the easiest thing to play the Tadgh an dá thaobh, and God knows there are plenty of people in this place who want to be Tadgh an dá thaobh. The Labour Party motion is honest. What we are seeking to do is to bring about a perspective which seeks to provide some enlightenment on this issue that exercises us all.

I want to focus very briefly on the issue of long Covid. I ask the Minister to take on board the fact there are people now suffering the effects of long Covid. It is an expression that has worked its way into the public discourse and we are seeing its effects. However, it has not been classified officially. I ask the Minister and the Government to put in place a pot of funding so that Science Foundation Ireland, the Health Research Board and the Department can take a collective approach to looking at the effects of long Covid. We are now seeing the effects of this in terms of the presentations of other types of illness as a result of people having contracted Covid. The only research I can speak to in an Irish context that exists at present is the 2021 Trinity College and St. James Hospital research by Townsend et al. The authors looked at post-Covid lung assessments and imaging to date. They examined 153 patients and concluded that 62% felt they had not returned to full health, 48% met the case definition for fatigue - this was not associated with severity of initial infection - and a number of the 153 had abnormal chest X-rays quite a length of time after having received a diagnosis of Covid.

All I am asking is that the Government adopts a cross-departmental approach, brings in the research funders and start issuing funding calls so that our excellent scientists working in health can start researching this. If there is an evidence base for it, we can then acknowledge that the Department of Social Protection could put in place a payment which recognises the long-term impact on people of Covid, something akin to the enhanced illness benefit payment that recognises long Covid. Long after having received a diagnosis of Covid people feel the ill effects of it. They are missing work. There is the issue of fatigue and also issues relating to the impact on people's hearts and lungs.

As a society, we need to acknowledge this issue and address it. If we have an evidence base with well-funded research, we can take that research and turn it into an acknowledgement, through the Department of Social Protection and the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, of the need to establish payments for those people where they are missing work and require a supplementary income to acknowledge the suffering they are going through at present. This is the call the Labour Party is making through the motion and I ask that the Minister uses his good offices. I know he is a research-minded Minister and if we call on the Minister to do this we would be doing a good day's work to acknowledge those people suffering from long Covid.

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