Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will return to this and will stick to these points. I will ask the Minister to address these, as he has agreed to take a note of them.

We rolled over much legislation in October before the deadline of November. I implored the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, who sat approximately where the Minister is sitting now - the Minister was also present - to come back to us with a report on mental health tribunals. Can we see that report before we vote on giving powers to roll this over indefinitely? We are talking about introducing all of these amendments indefinitely. Why do we not just amend the Mental Health Acts to say that people will not have a proper mental health tribunal, because that is what we have done?

As Deputy Bruton said, there may have been a very good reason for this at the time, and I agree with him that there may well have been an excellent reason for it at the time, but that reason has passed. If a person is being held involuntarily, that is happening because a doctor believes he or she poses a danger to himself or herself or others. A mental health tribunal is held because a person wishes to challenge that and argue he or she has the capacity to engage with the world and does not need to be detained. I cannot think of anything worse than a person being told he or she has had a hearing and others who looked into the case, disagreed with him or her and agreed with the person who is his or her captor. How would a person have confidence, as a detained person, that an independent process looked into his or her case if he or she is not even brought before a tribunal and the decision of the tribunal is not properly imported to him or her?

When we rolled this over we did not have proper statistics on presentations for self-harm. I ask the Minister to tell me I am wrong and that we now have full statistics from March 2020 until April 2021 in respect of each and every emergency department in the State on presentations for self-harm. How many suicides have there been? Has there been an uptick in suicides in respect of 2020 or the first 12 months of the pandemic to March this year? Do we have that information? If not, how on earth can we make these decisions to roll the legislation over?

I am not saying anything that I have not said before, but it strikes me as absurd that we are giving power to the Government to roll these regulations over. In a couple of weeks' time I am sure as a Parliament we will roll over the Offences Against the State Act and the existence of the Special Criminal Court. I do not have a problem with special criminal courts. However, I refer to an independent commission chaired by a former Attorney General and member of the Supreme Court, the late Mr. Justice Anthony J. Hederman. I have a problem with the fact that a person can be tried in the Special Criminal Court solely on the direction of the Director of Public Prosecutions, DPP, and that cannot be challenged. We have rolled that over year after year, and then after an independent report, we rolled it over again. Despite UN criticism, it was rolled over anyway. That is where we are heading with this Bill.

For the Minister to say that it does not sit well with him is a nonsense if he is introducing legislation to empower this to be rolled over year in and year out and month in and month out. I fear that is what will happen. Why are we rolling it over? I am minded of a quote from when I studied law a very long time ago about the exclusionary rule of evidence, namely, that it is easier to sit in the shade and put chili peppers under some poor devil's nails than to gather evidence in the heat of the hot sun. It is not an exact quote.

Why are we assuming these powers? What have we done to increase healthcare capacity in order that some of these measures might not be necessary? I am afraid to say I do not see a huge amount of information on that. I appreciate that ICUs and hospitals cannot be built overnight. They are in China. In Wuhan a hospital was built in a fortnight. We are modelling all of these lockdowns and extraordinary measures which are a complete anathema to western civilisation and our way of life from China. Where are the new hospitals?

We could build fever hospitals in the 1950s when the country had a lot less money and tuberculosis, in particular, was rampant in our community. We did not lock down our society in response to that because we acknowledged it would be around and we would not be able to get rid of it for a while, and that was not an appropriate response. We are saying that we are nearly there and Covid will not be around for very much longer, but if we are wrong and it is around we need these powers to deal with it. Which is it? The Government could introduce legislation to extend the measures, which I would still oppose. I, like Deputy Connolly, did not call a vote and oppose this draconian legislation a year ago although I feared it would be abused. It was rolled over.

Enough is enough at some point. The powers have been in place. The people have been locked down. The same trolley count is evident in the midwest today as it was six months, a year, 18 months or two years ago. Nothing has been done to increase hospital capacity or improve our stock of schools and the type of schools we have. Yet, billions of taxpayers' money has been spent or, rather, borrowed and spent. To quote the "Scrap Saturday" line of the late Brian Lenihan, "Maybe they'll forget". I sat in Government backbenches and had to vote for budgets that were a choice between bad and worse. I fear that is where we are heading again quickly if, instead of increasing our health capacity, we resort to locking down society and the economy.

We are going to do it at the behest of an unelected group of people, namely, NPHET, which is answerable to nobody. A committee used to interrogate it. Maybe the style of the interrogation was unpleasant for it. If it was, I apologised at the time and I apologise again. That is democracy, however. If people want to wield that kind of power they have to answer questions to somebody. It seems that it does not want to, even the very few difficult questions it is asked in press conferences. One member came out against antigen testing, notwithstanding the fact that the European Union agreed to antigen testing across the bloc in the past. Moreover, the chief scientific adviser to the Government has come out in favour of it.

Yet it is this same adviser and the modelling group he is a member of that largely determine Government policy, which is wildly inaccurate, unfortunately. It was wildly inaccurate in October-November when we locked down. The idea to lock down to save Christmas was dreamt up by the National Public Health Emergency Team, NPHET. Of course it was going to have disastrous consequences, because we had an over-restrictive regime in place during the summer when people should be outside socialising, meeting and doing what human beings do. We locked down in winter to save Christmas celebrations which were, perforce, going to be indoors, based on flawed, or apparently flawed, modelling. Notwithstanding the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response report, none of the recommendations of which have been implemented, nobody has ever asked that all the information available to NPHET, including the modelling and coding, be published and peer reviewed. That has not happened.

We roll over the Special Criminal Courts, to which I object, and we roll over people who are suspected of being involved in a proscribed organisation. In this instance, we are rolling over restrictions on people for doing what every human being does. It is not acceptable.

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