Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

Last night's "RTÉ Investigates" provided shocking insights into the treatment of elderly citizens in some of our nursing homes during the pandemic. I again support, loudly and clearly, the call for a national inquiry into nursing home care and nursing home deaths in the time of Covid. The case for that is now unanswerable. I will address the issue of the vaccination of people aged over 18. They are to get the one-shot Janssen vaccine in pharmacies. This process will start on Monday. I will start by appealing to young people to avail of this and to get vaccinated. The point has been raised over the course of this week that young people should be paid money to get vaccinated. I do not quite know where this idea came from. It smacks of the scenes in the United States wherein people were given beer and pizza if they got vaccinated. I do not believe that young people need that. They can see the sense in getting vaccinated. It makes sense for themselves, for their families and for society. Young people have made big sacrifices. They have not only been hit the hardest medically, they have also been hit the hardest economically. They have made great sacrifices and have shown great patience. Young people will do the right thing with the vaccination. To leave the beer and pizzas to one side, there is a powerful case to be made for a Covid dividend for our young people, a package or suite of measures as we come towards a point in this pandemic, during which our young people have made a great many sacrifices. Such a suite of measures could and should include things like an increase in the national minimum wage to €15 an hour. That is a far better to dealing with this question than the beer-and-pizza approach floated earlier in the week.

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