Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

The reason this has been raised so often is because of the damage that it is doing to the country. Ireland has had the longest and most severe lockdown of any country in Europe. According to Reuters a couple of weeks ago, Ireland had 163 days of workplace closures and that compared to Germany, which had 34 days of workplace closures. The reason for the length and severity of the lockdown in this country is because the Government has not got the other tools against this virus right and prime among them is the issue of the vaccine. There is a massive cost to society from this. There are 830,000 people currently on hospital waiting lists. We have heard oncologists telling us that there will be an influx of far more advanced cancers into the system because the health service is not able to deal with people who have non-Covid illnesses.

From my perspective, the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, has been involved in horizon politics. Every time he sets an objective and a date, by the time we get to that date, the objective slides back into the horizon and we never get to the objective. Deputy Donnelly stated that we would have all of the nursing homes vaccinated by the end of January. They were still vaccinating nursing homes at the end of February. On 14 February, the Minister said that within three weeks, all those over the age of 85 would be vaccinated. In my county, I know of GP surgeries that do not yet have a date for their first tranche of vaccines for those over the age of 85.

Other countries have been proactive. We have seen Austria and Denmark get involved in a partnership with Israel to see can they find vaccines. We have seen other countries in the European Union seek to additionally chase down supply.

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