Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputies Paul Murphy and Barry.

Sadly, this legislation on quarantine is the latest instalment in the totally defective and failed policy of the Government for dealing with Covid-19. To be honest, the legislation is nothing more than quarantine by name, but neither in effect nor in practice, for incoming travellers and therefore will continue to allow the virus and the variants to move into the country freely and completely undermine all of the huge sacrifice and hardship that the public are going through. People have endured two months of harsh lockdown but, because the Government refuses to introduce a mandatory quarantine on all non-essential travel into the country and simultaneously refuses to deal with those employers who are breaking the lockdown and ignoring the work-from-home provisions of public health, the Government is undermining huge sacrifices and efforts that everybody else is making and guaranteeing that the lockdown will go on indefinitely. The Government is prolonging the agony because of indecision and half-measures and this legislation is one of the most extreme examples of half-measures when it comes to dealing with the importation of the virus. The idea is to select 20 countries, particularly from Africa and Latin America, and one from Europe for some odd reason.

In respect of the majority of other countries - in Europe, the US and elsewhere - where we know that the virus is circulating at high rates and the variants will come from, there is a different set of rules and quarantining will not be required. That is madness. This decision is full of holes and renders the entire approach meaningless, but it is linked with the Government's half-baked policy for dealing with Covid.

I must take this opportunity to say that the Taoiseach should start being honest. He was thoroughly dishonest when he told Deputy Paul Murphy today that those who advocated for zero Covid wanted a longer lockdown. Under the Government's policies, we have been locked down for nine of the past 12 months and we will be locked down indefinitely because it continues to allow rogue employers to break lockdown regulations and allows incoming travel from countries from which we know the virus and its variants will come, thereby undermining public health efforts and the significant sacrifices that our healthcare workers have endured in dealing with the pandemic and guaranteeing the continuation of the surge-lockdown pattern. The Government has learned nothing, but it wants to pretend that it is doing something. Why it is doing this is inexplicable. The only reason I can imagine is that it has some misguided notion that this will protect certain economic interests. That would be short-sighted, though. In truth, failing to drive the virus down, chase it out and then prevent it from re-entering the country is a recipe for more severe and long-term economic damage, which is exactly what has happened.

We are arguing for a clear policy of acknowledging that we cannot live beside Covid-19. The idea that we can is a dangerous fantasy, and a fatal one for the more than 1,000 people who have lost their lives this year alone as a result of it. It is a half-life and not living for the majority of people who remain indefinitely locked down.

The virus will come to the country from abroad and chase us in our communities because that is what the Government is allowing it to do. The Government imagines that there are tolerable levels of infection. People should think about this. The Government is already talking about lifting restrictions when infection levels are still three times higher than when it lifted restrictions in December. It imagines that it will be able to manage and control this situation even while operating a quarantine regime that does not apply to the majority of countries where the virus and its variants are circulating. That is madness. I appeal to the Government to wake up. It is taking a serious gamble. Ironically, it is worsening the possibility of losing that gamble through its half measures in respect of the travel quarantine. If the virus continues to circulate and the Government continues to allow more variants into the country because it will not impose a quarantine on travel from most of the countries from which they come, the chances of the vaccination programme on which we are all depending being undermined are greater. The greater the number of variants that enter the country, the more the virus circulates and the greater the possibility that one of the variants will evade the vaccine. Then we will be in serious trouble. If, on the other hand, the Government drives community transmission levels down to zero, it has the public health infrastructure and tracing and testing infrastructure to deal with outbreaks, and it prevents the reseeding of the virus through travel into the country, the likelihood of the vaccination programme being effective in eliminating Covid-19, allowing us to get our lives back and ending the misery of a semi-permanent cycle of surge and lockdown is far greater.

I will make a few specific points about the legislation. We have tabled amendments to the effect that all countries and non-essential travel should be subject to mandatory quarantine. We have also tabled amendments to deal with the outsourcing facilitated by this legislation. It is noticeable that Australia, which runs an effective quarantine regime, does not allow outsourcing. The Government is planning to outsource many elements of the services that would provide the quarantine facilities to agencies and other business interests that want to make money out of them. Not only is that disgraceful, in that it potentially facilitates people profiteering from the quarantine regime, but it also threatens to undermine the health purpose of quarantine. If agency workers move from one quarantine location to another, the possibility that they will spread the disease is heightened. This is specifically precluded in Australia, where people are directly employed by the state authorities and stay at one location so that they do not spread the virus.

We do not understand why the Government has made a series of exceptions. In particular, why are politicians, diplomats and state officials exempted from the mandatory quarantine provisions? Is there some notion that politicians and diplomats cannot carry the virus? It is ridiculous. Politicians, diplomats and state officials should be subject to the same rules. Of course we need haulage, direct logistical work and so on, but I do not know why the Government is allowing so many exceptions.

My final point is related. The Government praises the healthcare workers who have borne the brunt of this crisis on the Covid front line when it needs them or wants to exploit them, but it abandons them when it believes no one is looking. It should be noted that the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, stated in recent days that student nurses and midwives, to whom promises were made about recognising and acknowledging their work while on placements on the Covid front line in our health service, had been abandoned. The Government has abandoned them. They are either not getting paid or those who are getting paid anything are being paid less than they were last March. They are even being told that they may have to repay the time lost on placements later in the summer, meaning that they will be punished for working on the Covid front line. That is a disgraceful treatment of our student nurses and midwives.

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