Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to raise the issue of Erasmus students who have contacted me worried about the fact that under the current roll-out programme they will not be vaccinated prior to leaving to attend universities across the EU. I submitted a parliamentary question on this matter to the Minister's office, but the reply takes no account of the vaccine needs and concerns of these young people who will be leaving this State for up to ten months, and their parents. It is a record year with over 7,000 students heading across the EU and an exciting time for them after the two years' disruption to their studies. To protect them and our neighbours in the host countries they should be able to get vaccinated before they leave and not be left at the mercy of the bureaucracy of a health system in another part of Europe. In some countries in Europe, non-residents are at the end of the queue. No young adult wants to have that worry and no parent wants to be worrying about his or her adult child or children getting sick or at risk of Covid when abroad. I ask the Minister to give consideration to these students being able to get vaccinated before they go. We have an international responsibility to ensure that the students we send abroad are not at risk and will not cause risk or burden to health systems in other countries. I am also anxious that we would live up to our international responsibility to get more vaccines to our brothers and sisters in poorer countries around the world.

As in the case of climate change, Covid affects all of us. We are all interdependent. If this pandemic has not taught us that, I do not know how our intelligence fairs. Our fates are intertwined. Leaving the selfishness out of it, the Delta variant has shown us that we are not at the end of the road in terms of Covid. The mood has much changed in the last week. Last week, the CMO was optimistic, but we appear to be back to square one. The sharing of vaccines is essential to poorer parts of the world where the virus is outrunning vaccines. We still have a chance in our race. Their new variants become our new variants. For selfish reasons alone, we should care about that very much.

Ireland has a seat at the UN Security Council. We need to do what we can to make the world secure. I hope there will be a rethink in relation to the intellectual property rights and the lifting of the waiver to expand vaccine production across the world. If this pandemic was not something that affects economies all over the world, I dread to think how we might have reacted to it.

On "Prime Time" last night, I add my voice to the calls for a public inquiry. It is almost one year since I called for such an inquiry. I am a Teachta Dála for Kildare, which has suffered disproportionately in terms of deaths. I pay tribute to Professor Cusack, the Kildare coroner, who was to the fore in highlighting how we fared in Kildare.

Related to the virus and vaccine roll-out is the issue of partners of pregnant women having access to visits. It is almost a year since I first raised this issue with the Minister as well. I was one of the first Deputies to raise it in this House. Listening to the airwaves, it appears we are back again to this being an issue. Fathers are now more likely to be able to wet their baby's head indoors in a pub than to see it on a scan. That is bonkers. We are supposed to have had huge learning over the past 18 months about what really matters in life, but I do not think we have. The maternity hospitals need to be on board. Access should not be dependent on where a person lives. As I said, it is almost one year since I first raised this issue with the Minister. Women are facing invasive internal examinations not because they are necessary but to establish their status in labour in order that their partners might be allowed to join them. It is obvious that the people making the decisions here have never given birth. I hope the Minister will look at this area again.

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