Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputies across the House for their contributions. It is most valuable to hear them. Certainly, one of the things that the Minister for State and I will take away is the need to have an immediate conversation with the HSE and the Department in respect of doing everything possible to get to the housebound. The National Ambulance Service is doing Trojan work, but we will engage, particularly after today's session, to see what more can be done. It is very clear, as we know from our own representations also, there are many people who are still desperately waiting to be vaccinated and protected.

I will summarise by saying that it has been a very difficult year as we know, and we do not need to get into it again. The Leas-Cheann Comhairle quite rightly spoke to some of the very dark parts of what has happened over the past year.

I will state that the plan is working. It essentially has three elements, namely, the virus at home, variants abroad and the vaccine programme. All three elements of that plan are working, thanks to huge efforts from thousands of women and men all over Ireland.

In respect of the virus at home, we now have one of the lowest rates in the EU. Cases are down below 400 a day. There is a 10% reduction in cases week on week in comparison with last year. The R number remains below zero, though I am going straight from this session to an update meeting with NPHET and we will see what the R number is now. There have been no new outbreaks in nursing homes in the past three weeks, which is phenomenal. The number of close contacts for positive cases has remained steady, at 2.6. This means the credit for case numbers staying low does not go to the vaccination programme - not yet - but to the public for following the public health advice and keeping close contacts low. Many of the meetings that are happening are taking place outdoors, which is making a huge difference.

We obviously need to be careful. I know there is a growing desire for things to open and to open quickly, but we have been here before and there was a big clamour to open everything as quickly as possible. We must be careful. GP referrals have gone up again this week. The positive test results coming out of the laboratories have gone up again, and nearly every new case is the B117 variant. That means the situation remains volatile. While it might feel very positive, and indeed it is, it would take very little for cases to rise again very quickly. Therefore, for the next number of weeks we need to continue doing what we have been doing as we carefully reopen, which is something we all want.

In terms of guarding against the variants coming into the country, we do not live in an airtight container and there is no perfect protection against that, especially given there are two jurisdictions on the Island. However, the barriers to the variants are working. Mandatory hotel and home quarantining, preflight PCR tests and genome sequencing are all together having the desired effect. Ireland still has a relatively low number of variants, but we are very conscious of surges in variants in places like Canada, France, and most recently, as discussed today, in India. We are constantly keeping those under review. We now have by a long way and of any country in Europe the strongest measures against the importation of variants. It is working.

Our vaccine programme is working. Ireland has the highest percentage of over-80s vaccinated out of any country in the EU. It is something we should be very proud of. We are one of a handful of countries that have fully vaccinated - at least with a first dose - healthcare workers.

I will finish by reiterating my thanks to everybody involved. It is a huge effort right across Ireland in every town, village and city, and right across the healthcare, voluntary and public sectors. It has been an immense task. We are dealing with repeated large changes to the programme which we have to work very quickly to incorporate so that we can keep the momentum going. Therefore, I want to express my thanks to every single person who is involved in this effort.

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