Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The House is running ahead of schedule. I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak on this motion. Hotel quarantine has been fairly well debated over the last while. There is something I cannot understand. We have been contacted by many people about this issue, for instance, people who were travelling from Abu Dhabi or countries in that region and had parents going into hospital for a serious operation. They had been vaccinated, and were actually fully vaccinated long before many EU citizens, but the vaccine was not recognised by the EU. This put them in a quagmire when it came to quarantine.

We have to look at whether we are closing the country or not. People can travel from abroad into the North and come down across the Border pretty handy with no major problem. We cannot account for everyone in a country but most people are fairly responsible. I heard a discussion on "The Pat Kenny Show" on my way to Dublin. The person being interviewed said she did not know if vaccinated people from the UK with a certificate still needed to quarantine here. Some things are still not clear. We have to start moving on. The Delta variant is here and hopefully we will get on top of it. In my opinion, however, you either do full duck or no dinner and we never did the full duck. The half-hearted quarantine system that we are using is basically a token gesture.

I feel for Irish people abroad, especially those in Abu Dhabi and countries in that region. Some are teaching and some want to come home. This is their country. They are paying large sums to quarantine. There is an appeals system but I do not know how it works, to be frank, because the answer that emerges from it is generally "No". People might make an appeal for someone whose mother or father is having an operation. No one knows how things like this will go in a hospital. Thankfully, in some of the cases we were involved in, everything went well but if someone is trying to come home to see their parents before a serious operation, we should accommodate them in a special way and have our arms open to those who are vaccinated.

There should be more research done to find out if the vaccines used in these other countries stand up. The EU, rather than wobbling and twisting about the vaccine, should recognise these vaccines. The statistics from those countries, if they are to be believed, show the different vaccines are as good as the ones that are available in Europe. We have to move on as a country. We have to get up and running and get open. We introduced hotel quarantining too late. The time to stop the Delta variant was a good while ago.

It is here now so we would not be stopping something from coming in. Ireland, as a country, now has to move on, open up and bring people in to try to get the tourism sector and all the other sectors up and running.

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