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

I thank the Deputies for their questions. We will give as much clarity and hope as we can on Tuesday. We will also need to be honest as we are not out of the woods yet. I am hopeful about the summer but the next couple of weeks are very worrying. The situation is deteriorating across Europe and appears to be deteriorating here as well. We will give people as much clarity as we can but we have seen on so many occasions that this virus rips up our plans. I do not want to give people assurances for six weeks’ time that we then have to withdraw in three weeks’ time, as that is not fair either.

On the risk profile question, this will change because of the vaccine but only 10% of people have received a shot now and it has not changed the risk profile enough at this stage. We really need to be up around 40% to 50% of people having received one vaccine before one would see that having a meaningful impact on the R number and we are not there yet.

On vaccine supply, I attended the European People’s Party, EPP, summit this morning and I engaged with President von der Leyen on this. She and we are doing everything we can to speed up supply in the second quarter of this year. It will speed up during this quarter and she is confident that we will have between 300 million to 360 million doses in the European Union in the second quarter of this year, that is in April, May and June. That is over 3 million doses, more than 1 million a month, coming to Ireland in that second quarter.

On testing, as I mentioned earlier, we are now extending PCR testing on demand to five parts of the country where there is a high incidence in Dublin and in Tullamore. A person does not need to go to a GP and can just drop in for a test. We are also going to see greater use of antigen testing, particularly in outbreaks and in workplaces.

We are not ready yet to treat different counties differently. Unfortunately, there is no county in Ireland at the moment where the incidence is low enough. Even where it is low it is five, ten, or twenty times what it was last summer.

Finally, on cancer services, as it is Daffodil Day tomorrow I want to thank Deputy Nolan for raising the issue of cancer services. I fully agree with her that we will do everything we can to get as many cancer services back up and running as soon as is possible. I fear secondary deaths as a consequence of this pandemic, that is people not dying of Covid-19 but from other conditions because they did not get the care that they needed during the pandemic.

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