Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There is a substantial amount of money in the budget for this year in various different places. There is a contingency fund, which is a central Government fund, and then there is a significant amount in the health budget. An awful lot of the activities involved in the vaccination programme are being funded out of that such as testing, tracing, genome sequencing and pop-up walk-in centres. The Deputy makes an excellent point on subsequent years. I have no doubt that one of the line items that will be in the health budget, for example, will be around vaccinations and Covid-19.

I am sure the Deputy would join me in welcoming the historic agreement that was struck just last year with the public health doctors. We will, for the first time ever, have what we need here, which is public health consultants. That is something they have been seeking for over 25 years. As well as that, we are doubling the public health workforce and putting a lot of investment into upgrading IT systems as well as a national reform programme. On the Deputy's point, not only do we need the budget, which we do, but we need a world class public health system. In recent months, we have been putting the building blocks for that in place because that is what Ireland deserves and needs.

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