Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I wish to raise the strategy announced yesterday on dealing with Covid-19 entitled Covid-19 Resilience & Recovery 2021: The Path Ahead. Unfortunately, though, it is anything but a path ahead. Regrettably, it is a hope-and-see strategy. There is nothing new in it that we did not know about. It is basically a wing and a prayer. It is totally reliant on vaccines. There is no effort at metrics at all. I did not want timelines. In fact, I believe the comments that were made about mid-summer should not have happened. While I did not want timelines, I wanted to give people hope. I wanted to see some metrics that could be defined by the public health teams, namely, the National Public Health Emergency Team, NPHET, and the Government. However, there is nothing there to give people hope. The people are in despair. I have never in my political career felt the despair as I have over the last number of weeks, particularly given all the communications failures the Government has had.

My real issue is that there are no new tools and nothing in the plan to suppress the virus; it is a case of let us just wait for the vaccines. The reason there are no new tools is because the Government does not have confidence, unfortunately, that it will be able to keep all the variants out. We know there is another UK version, unfortunately, and a Californian version. They all need analysis. The Government will not be able to deal with community transition as quickly as we need it to, and the public health teams simply are not resourced enough.

Many times, Opposition parties make suggestions and the Government challenges them to back it up with their own policies or put forward ideas or proposals. Here, therefore, are seven proposals which are not in the plan: mandatory quarantine, which we will be discussing later today and which the Government is opposing with regard to it being brought in for everywhere; antigen testing, which I have now been proposing for six months in this House; a survey of why businesses are sending so many people into work; serial testing of congregated settings; retrospective track, trace and testing; sick pay; and resourcing public health teams in order that they can act quickly on future outbreaks. None of these seven proposals are included in the document to suppress the virus and give people hope. Let us all just rely on the vaccine roll-out. I pray it is successful.

The public are in despair, however. I am not sure if the Taoiseach realises that. Therefore, I will ask this of him quite clearly on the floor of the Dáil, seeing as he would not cover it in his document yesterday. What is he doing in a different way to suppress the virus, get down community transmission rates and make sure the variants do not come into this country?

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