Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I support the Bill. The last year and a half has been incredibly difficult. Mistakes were made and there is no question about that. I still cannot understand why we did not control people who returned from Italy in the spring of last year. We knew that was the main source. I still cannot understand why we did not say to people who went to Cheltenham that they would have to quarantine for two weeks. I still have serious misgivings on how the nursing home issue was handled, when people were discharged from nursing homes who potentially had Covid. In 20 or 30 years' time, just as we look back at things in previous generations, that particular episode will be examined fully and I am not sure we will come out of it in a good light.

It is well known that I oppose guillotines in the Dáil unless there is an extreme emergency. I believe in talking things out and giving everybody their say until, at least, I have done my best to persuade people to my point of view and they have done their best to persuade me to their point of view. However, when I look at the bigger scene from a human, community and ordinary people's point of view, I have to look at what would have happened if we had not had restrictions and pit that against what did happen because we had restrictions. At every step of the way, as any human being would, I will look at details of what was done and ask why this was or was not done. Sometimes the Government was too strict and at other times too lax. These are matters of detail, but the general position is that we needed controls.

We have to admit that Covid has taken a huge toll. There are a significant number of deaths and people who are suffering from long Covid and mental health issues. Young people have lost well over a year of their lives in very constrained circumstances, when they should either have been in college mixing with many new people for the first time or in school doing all the things young people do. I have to hand it to the young people of Ireland for their solidarity. They have shown solidarity against a disease that would be much easier on them in the generality of these things, statistically, than it is on those who are in the older population.

I am absolutely glad that we seem to be getting to a better place. I received many letters and emails from people about the restrictions and this Bill. I did not manage to answer them all, but my reply was that the practical effect of the Bill is quite simple, which is that we and the Government are rolling back the lockdown but it is a tricky balance as we found out at Christmas. It is a balance between opening up and not allowing the genie out of the bottle again. It is a race between opening up and the roll out of the vaccine. We seem to be stuck at about 400 cases a day. There are 40 people in intensive care units, ICU, at the moment. I have been watching the British figures for a long time, day by day, and when I translate them, taking their population into account against ours and allowing they are six weeks ahead of us in the vaccine roll-out, they have for a long period been at about 100 to 200 cases a day. In relative terms we are worse. At this moment in time they, again, have much lower numbers in ICU than us, equivalent to the population.

We are in a delicate position. If we do not open up people will move on, but open up too fast and we might go backwards with the spread of the disease. It was very difficult. Families were separated from their loved ones. I have grandchildren I have only seen a handful of times and a new grandchild in England I have not seen at all. I have family in Australia. These are all difficult realities so none of us is immune to what all this meant. We can be over-legalistic about everything, but the reality on the human level and the real choice was that it was better to make all those sacrifices, take all those inconveniences, not visit the neighbours, not go to all the things one would normally go to, not meet constituents who had problems and try to do it other ways. It was better to do that and try to come out the other side of this in the whole of one's health.

As one of the older members of the House, I probably take as much physical exercise as most. I do about 10 km every day, I am active, in the whole of my health and have not had a sick day in I cannot remember how many years. However, I am told that, statistically, somebody of my age would be at very high risk if they caught Covid. Speaking for my generation, I really thank the younger generations who were willing to take restrictions because they knew the older generation would be hugely vulnerable to this, even if the risk for them was much less. Up until Christmas, many people said to me the restrictions were way too strict. Then January and February happened and the hospitals were full.

There was one lady I knew very well, though thankfully I do not know many people in the whole of their health who died from this disease. I was talking to her at the beginning of January. I knew her well and used to be on the phone to her. She was a widow living on her own. What happened in her case was that a friend came to visit, they had a cup of tea and went for a drive. The friend did not realise she had Covid and this lady got it and was dead by the end of the month. If she had not caught Covid, there is no reason to believe she would not be in the whole of her health today.

I heard people in the debate this evening talking about capacity in the health service. Of course we need capacity in the health service, and that issue must be addressed, but that does not solve the Covid dilemma. We did not try to control Covid because we did not have capacity in the health service. It was a factor, particularly in the beginning, but the other factor was that preventative medicine is always a much better option for a bigger number of the population than trying to cure them when they get sick. That is why we have campaigns against smoking, that is why we encourage people to take exercise, and that is why we have so many checks on people's health. No matter what the capacity of the health service is, the effort should be to avoid people winding up in hospital and minimise the number of people who do. Everybody who reflects on it would say that hospitals and care are hugely important when people need them but that they are the last option. It is much better never to wind up there if it can be avoided at all.

We have some magnificent scenery around where I live and we are willing to share it with anybody who wants to come. One of the great positives that has come out of this is the huge appreciation people have developed for exercise, the great outdoors, nature, and a different type of life than they may have been living beforehand. In some cases people had more time at home because they were working from home. I hope that good things will come out of this whole episode, as always happens with things like this. One of them could be a much better work-life balance for people with young families. They would not have to get up at 6 o'clock in the morning, leave the kids at the crèche at 7 a.m. and come home at 7 or 8 o'clock at night, try to look after the kids and tumble out of bed again the next day. Many more of them will be able to live a much more civilised life and work from home two or three days a week. Even on the days they go in, they could do so outside rush hour and not be sitting in traffic for an hour and a half on a journey that might take half an hour or three quarters of an hour at off-peak times.

There seems to be some worry in the ether that lockdowns will last forever. I do not really buy into that because if there was no good reason as the people saw it - not as the barristers, lawyers and solicitors here see it but as the people do - and if they did not think lockdown was needed, there would not be any compliance. In practice, enforcement of all this has, in the main, been benign, reasonable and proportionate. None of these regulations would have worked if the vast majority of people did not know in their hearts and souls that there was a need for what was being done on health grounds and that it was in their interest. The vast majority of people adhered to the rules because they knew in their heart and soul that it was being done for their good. In the very unlikely event that any Government thought it could continue with lockdowns when there was no significant risk to the people, it would be absolutely foolish to do so because the people would do what they would and they would not do what they have done, which is to comply.

In reality, all the other lockdowns, partial lockdowns and partial reopenings were in a different scenario from the one we are in now. So far, it would appear that the vaccines are very effective in stopping transmission and preventing people from getting the virus asymptomatically or symptomatically and winding up in hospital or an ICU. The HPSC epidemiological reports show that as we move down the age cohorts of people getting the vaccine, the incidence of the disease is collapsing. The incidence of hospitalisation is collapsing in the groups among whom there were once the greatest numbers of deaths and hospitalisations. I do not take this issue lightly. I hope we will not have to continue with lockdowns. I am very confident that we will not and that Covid is something with which science is beginning to catch up. Even if new variants appear, scientists will be able to vary the vaccine to deal with any possible mutations in the future, as they do with the flu vaccine.

The situation as I see it is that the Government has a tricky decision to make, on the advice of NPHET. At the end of the day, it is not NPHET that is making the decision; it is the Government. The decision to be made is how quickly to open up and how confident it is that when we do, the disease will stay under control. We are lucky that Britain has got ahead of us. We are very lucky that there is a country across the water with a massive population that is six weeks ahead of us and has opened up way more than we have. Even on this island there are six counties where there has been a much greater opening up and it appears that, because they have reached a certain level of vaccination, they can control the disease in a stable way. The portents are good.

Civil liberties are hugely important. There are major protections within the Constitution of this State for people's civil liberties, including the inviolability of the home, the right to public assembly, the right to free association and so on. If any Government were mad enough to go beyond the point of reason, balance and overwhelming scientific evidence by continuing with lockdowns into the future, I do not think this Dáil would pass such a proposal. Even if we all got a rush of blood to our heads, I imagine that someone would take a case to the courts on constitutional freedoms and I have no doubt that the Supreme Court would rule in that person's favour, if it did not believe there was an overwhelming argument in favour of the restrictions. There are a lot of protections in that regard. Sometimes people who look at things through a microscope all the time do not get the big picture that the ordinary people who do not spend their days delving into the minutiae of laws see. We were faced with an unprecedented situation and, as I have pointed out, I would argue with some of the details of how it was handled.

I thought it was sometimes way too strict and other times not so strict. Intrinsically, however, there was a high rate of compliance with the advice and directives from the Government because the people, the ordinary people, understood the risk. They understood that even if there were no rules, that it was in their own interest to adhere to the measures.

Some people told me that they thought the measures were too strict. I had them on one hand, pulling out of me that way, while others told me that we were too lax altogether. They gave out yards to me because they thought we were not being strict enough and they asked me why the Government was not doing a much bigger job of enforcement. I remember getting frantic phone calls about people being on beaches in Connemara last year and being too close together. I think the risk in that situation was slight and I always thought that was the case. As I said to those people, if you got a can of air freshener and emptied it on such a beach, the contents would not last long in the wind on a Connemara beach on a winter's day. The people who were ringing me about that aspect, though, were afraid.

Therefore, we must continue to try to get the balance right and we must continue to try to keep the people with us as we do so. The majority of people have, I think, accepted the need for what was done to date. I hope now that at the end of this week, we will go another step in a process and then take more such steps every two to three weeks from now on, as the vaccinations roll out. The key to everything we are doing lies in how fast we can vaccinate people, and specifically regarding how quickly we are able to get not only one but two injections into all those eligible for them, namely, all adults over the age of 18. We will free up the country not by changing the law, but by rolling out the vaccines ever faster.

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