Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Barry.

We are now one quarter of the way through 2021 and this country has fully vaccinated less than 4% of the population. It is a similar picture in most countries in the EU because the issue we face at this stage is primarily one of supply. The immediate cause of this is the problems with AstraZeneca, which certainly seems to have sold its supply twice, to the EU and the UK, and then chosen to fulfil the ones it makes more money from, through its contract with the UK. The Taoiseach's response to that today was to urge the pharmaceutical companies to fulfil their contracts. It is the equivalent of saying to AstraZeneca: "You have signed this contract; pretty please, fulfil it."

The deeper cause is what the head of UNAIDS, Ms Winnie Byanyima, described to an Oireachtas committee. Big pharma is protecting its monopolies, technology and intellectual property and thus restricting the production of Covid vaccines. It is vaccine nationalism, vaccine imperialism and, fundamentally, vaccine capitalism, and the EU is allowing this to happen. The EU at the World Trade Organization, with the support, scandalously, of the Government, did not support the proposal to suspend the intellectual property on Covid vaccines in order that there could be generic production, and that AstraZeneca and all the other companies that have received more than €5 billion in public funding for research could no longer restrict access to, and production of, these vaccines. That is the way to deal with this crisis but it is a route the EU refuses to take. Rather than dancing to their tune, it is time we stood up to these profiteers.

Turning to the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill, it is really a success of spin over substance. The Government is patting itself on the back for setting so-called ambitious targets but the elephant is the room is that these targets are mere political spin because of how far out the implementation dates are. It talks about a 50% reduction by 2030, relative to a 2018 baseline, without saying what it will do this year, next year and in the lifetime of the Government. It is making promises for a future Government that are inadequate in and of themselves. They are even less ambitious than EU climate law. The EU measures the reduction against 1990 and is heading for targets by 2030 of 55% or 60%, significantly more than the targets of the Government, but neither of those targets follows the science. We need binding reductions of 10% a year to get to zero carbon by 2030. That is what the science demands and it is what the environmental movement must demand too.

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