Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I did not comment directly in response to that. I think An Garda Síochána did and I will let it speak on Garda operational matters.

The Deputy made various points about testing and tracing. We get pretty much weekly updates from the special Cabinet subcommittee on Covid. On Monday this week we met with the Deputy CMO, Dr. Ronan Glynn, Mr. Paul Reid, Prof. Brian MacCraith and various other officials who set out what is the latest situation. I am relating what I hear at those meetings. The Deputy was absolutely right, as was the Tánaiste, about how when cases go above a certain level it becomes very hard to do the contact tracing in an effective way. It becomes so widespread they cannot drill down to check back on every single thing and follow through. We are now back to numbers where that is possible. As I understand it there are 900 people working flat out - they are flat out, they are probably worked to the bone and it has been tougher for them than for anyone over the last year. People in the health system in general have been working flat out. The tracing teams are very good at it and are following every case.

I heard on Monday that there is a significant percentage of cases, up to about a quarter, where they are finding it difficult to trace what exactly the contact is. This is not because of any flaw in their system but there is still reasonably widespread community transmission. It seems the characteristics of the new variant are such that it is very easily transmitted in a way that is not easy to do tracing. I understand a close contact is someone a person has been in close conversation with for 15 minutes or in a room with for two hours. There seems to be some incidence of transmission with the new variant where somebody outside that close contact still transmits it and that makes it difficult for the tracers to pursue it. However, there is no shortage of resources or effort in the contact tracing system we have. At that Monday meeting there was real concern about whether there was a plateauing of the numbers. We should never take just one or two day's numbers. We must look at the five-day average and the 14-day average. Thankfully, in the last two to three days, we have seen the positivity rate come down before 5% for the first time, to 4.6% and then 4.32% yesterday. If we can keep that down then we will have further capability to focus really tightly on where the UK variant which is dominant here is.

On the roll-out plan for the vaccine, I want to stand up for our public service and our health service in particular as they have been thrown three incredible challenges in recent weeks. The volume of vaccines we have available to us is obviously set by an EU system. The first significant challenge our health system had to address was because the system was under such stress and risk, we switched the whole vaccination programme to put front-line health workers first. That was an appropriate decision.

See this speech in context