Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Would a football match not be nice? I wish to thank all the front-line healthcare workers and all those involved in carrying out the vaccination programme. Nothing tangible has really been done in terms of a meaningful "thank you" to all healthcare workers. There should be some sort of financial acknowledgement for healthcare workers and, indeed, other groups such as the student nurses and midwives whose issues I and my colleagues have raised many times in the House and who should be paid for their placements. Along with the psychologists and all the other healthcare workers and allied professionals who have been undervalued, they need payback from the Government after Covid.

No matter how successful the vaccination programme turns out to be, if large swathes of the world are not vaccinated, we will get variants and we will have problems and this crisis will continue. I do not for the life of me understand why the Government and the EU do not understand the absolute urgency and imperative of sharing the vaccine technology and lifting the intellectual property restrictions and patent restrictions on getting the vaccine produced globally at the levels necessary to vaccinate the global population.

I wish to make one additional point on Israel and Palestine. If the Taoiseach wants proof that Israel is an apartheid and racist state, not a normal state, its vaccination programme is a perfect demonstration of that. It vaccinates Israeli citizens but not Palestinians, which, by the way, is very stupid from a health point of view apart from anything else, but also demonstrates the apartheid nature of the state and why we need to treat it the way apartheid South Africa was treated.

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