Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Has the Minister done a risk assessment for the provision of respite in instances where the residents in respite centres have been vaccinated, all of the staff have been vaccinated and those who seek respite have been vaccinated? How many non-front-line HSE staff, their relatives and friends have been vaccinated? Has the Minister done an investigation into it?

I welcome the walk-in test centres in Tullamore and those that have been set up in Dublin. Does the Minister understand how aggrieved the people in Belmullet in County Mayo feel when they hear this? They begged for a test centre that would prevent them having to travel a three-hour round trip to get a test when there were positive cases. People were dying and people were seriously ill, and the Minister would not give us a test centre in the north Mayo or Belmullet area. I ask the Minister to reflect on that and I ask that he would apologise to the people of north Mayo and Belmullet for the slow response to that.

I will read correspondence I received from an SNA in a primary school to the Minister. It reads:

Since we returned to school there has been none of the mass testing promised. We've been given a mask and told it is all perfectly safe. We've had an outbreak of Covid in our school since last week. I spent 2, 20 minute breaks sitting at a table with a staff member who tested positive for Covid one day later but, according to the HSE, I'm not a close contact... On Thursday a staff member in the unit presented with Covid symptoms and asked to be tested. [The] HSE told her, as she was not a close contact, she did not need testing. She organised a test privately and it came back positive so that unit was shut down.

The Minister for Education will not take any responsibility for what is happening within schools. We all want the schools to remain open. We desperately want them to remain open but I am asking for some honesty, some transparency and some action within the schools to keep the numbers down, to keep the schools open and to keep high-risk staff and students safe. Denial of the problems that exist is not going to deal with them.

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