Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The first question the Deputy asked was what we were doing to bring down Covid and that is the question I am answering. We are speeding up the vaccine roll-out. We have given more than 700,000 vaccines at this stage. We expect to receive more than 1 million vaccines by the end of this month but they will not all be in people's arms. It will probably be around 800,000, and another 1 million or so in April. We will have the report on antigen testing soon and that will be used in outbreaks in other places like work places. We are increasing our testing and tracing capacity and there has never been any restriction on resources in terms of taking on contact tracers or people in public health departments. We have always said to NPHET, the Department of Health and the HSE that this is probably the cheapest thing we could do. It much cheaper than the pandemic unemployment payment or the wage subsidy scheme to take on public health staff and contact tracers. There has never been a restriction on that.

To answer the question on public health doctors, I believe this should be a consultant-led service and negotiations are under way between the Government and the Irish Medical Organisation, IMO, about that. Should the IMO wish to refer those discussions to the Workplace Relations Commission or the Labour Court, both of which are under my remit, we would be happy to hear the case. Let us not be too simplistic about this. There are a lot of public health doctors in Scotland, England and Wales, many of them consultants. Yet their death rate and case rates are way higher than here. Let us not suggest that will be a silver bullet.

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