Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It would take more than a minute or a minute and a half to respond adequately to the Deputy's questions. No one is saying that everything is going perfectly with the roll-out. It is not going perfectly and there have been issues, as discussed here today, in terms of some consumables not arriving and some vaccination dates for GPs having been changed. Nobody is suggesting that it is going perfectly. However, the language the Deputy used is complete and absolute nonsense. It is that kind of loose talk and nonsense that erodes confidence in what is the most important thing that is happening in our country right now. To suggest that there are continued failures is nonsense. To suggest that targets are constantly being missed is also nonsense. In fact, had the Deputy been here earlier on, he would have heard a very reasoned debate between Government and Opposition on exactly that point.

The HSE's target is to vaccinate people as soon as the vaccines come into the country. To that end, at the start of this week, approximately 520,000 vaccine doses had arrived into the country. By the end of this week, approximately half a million vaccine doses will have been administered. That is the target, and the HSE and the thousands of men and women around this country, including doctors, nurses, school vaccination teams, community vaccination teams, the Defence Forces, the National Ambulance Service and many more, are working night and day to make sure this programme is a success. If the Deputy wants to check, he can look at the European league tables and what he will find is that Ireland is consistently among the top few countries in terms of the percentage of the population that has been vaccinated.

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