Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I implore the Minister of State, Deputy Byrne, when engaging with his colleagues in Europe, to really drive on the message that the digital green certificate is the way forward to allow international air travel to return. Aviation is at its lowest point of all time. It is very hard to see a recovery over the next 12 to 18 months. Some people say it could even take three years for the sector to recover fully. In recent days, we have seen the UK Government already start planning what its summer and its summer of international travel may look like. We need a Europe-wide plan. It took many months last year for European nations to devise and agree upon the traffic light system for international travel. We now need to move at a far greater pace with the digital green certificate.

There are three types of certificate involved. The Minister of State has been forthright and good in advancing the Irish cause. There is the vaccination certificate, the test certificate and the certification of Covid recovery. This is the only way in which people will have confidence to board planes again as they will know the passengers in front of, behind and beside them are Covid free, that it is safe to travel and that they will not be bringing Covid from one country to another.

People will say we are at peak Covid or just a shade below it. Some will even say we are about to head into a fourth wave of Covid. Some of that may be true. The National Public Health Emergency Team, NPHET, will advise us on that but the fact remains we need to strategise now for what the coming months will look like. We may be at a very high level of Covid and may not be able to move outside 5 km of our homes, but people need to be able to dream and to plan and hope for a future this summer that involves being able to go beyond our shores and people being able to come in from other countries. I ask the Minister of State and the Government to advance this issue in discussions in Europe. Now is the time to deliver this agreement. Now may not be the time to implement it, but perhaps the time will be right in a few weeks, so we need to get it in place.

A lot of the people who work in the aviation sector have to remain in current training. This includes pilots and cabin crew. They need a lead-in period. They need governments to show them a plan to which they can sign up to.

Finally, when he is in Europe, I ask the Minister of State to raise the idea of European governments buying stakes in the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing Covid vaccines. We have seen how the Norwegian Government has, time and again, taken stakes of up to 5% in private companies. EU states need to look at this to gain some collateral in the large companies manufacturing the vaccines.

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