Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is in a really difficult spot. He is listening to everybody here today and everybody has the exact same concerns. We are trying to get answers for constituents, people such as family carers and people who are not quite sure whether they are in cohort four or cohort seven. Completely reasonably, we are coming with these questions. If there is anything the Minister can do to help us have a single point of call to be able to get reasonable answers for such people reasonably quickly, I think it would alleviate an awful lot of concern, so I urge the Minister to do that. In addition - this is really more a general question than one that requires an answer now - I ask the Minister to help us to communicate with people as much as possible in that way. Today's debate is very helpful. We have good questions and we have Deputies present, but there are people coming through the doors wanting to have their vaccinations.

It is probably worth the House's time to take just one second to recognise two things about this vaccination that we did not know would happen. First, the vaccinations work. They work better than we had expected or hoped they could. That was absolutely not a given, and it is important just to recognise that. Second, it is so clear that the overwhelming majority of Irish people really want to get vaccinated, and indeed here we are arguing about when they will. That was not a given either. A couple of months ago we were talking about how we would convince people of the safety of vaccinations. It is just important to note those two really positive things about the vaccine experience so far.

I have a real degree of empathy - sympathy is not the right word - with the Minister's position. He is dependent on manufacturers to produce vaccines and to get them to us in a particular way. We have no real control over such manufacturers when they do not do so yet we are dependent on them to get a public health response to our people and to meet the commitments we have made to people. I want to acknowledge that that is not an easy position. The Minister has people such as me coming in and reasonably demanding a vaccination schedule from him, but I acknowledge that it is a difficult position.

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