Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am a little lost for words with regard to where we are now and where we are going. I worry about where we are going, whether there is a bottom line and whether the Minister has a bottom line as to what he is willing to implement. It appears that he and the Government do not. I asked the Taoiseach today if there were circumstances in which civil disobedience was acceptable, given that he clearly accepted that it was acceptable in Belarus. He did not answer.

I do not expect that the Minister will say what his bottom line is, and if he did tell us what it is, I do not expect that he would adhere to it. Last October, he told us very clearly that he was not going to introduce legislation that penalised masses in public. The day he told us he would not, he did. He had signed it that day. He told us a couple of weeks ago, when he was renewing the emergency provisions, that he did not expect to use them, hoped he would not use them and he did not envisage using them. We are here today because they did not go far enough to provide for what the Minister planned to do, which is to discriminate on the basis of vaccine status. The Taoiseach, in response to Deputy Connolly, assured everybody that it would be non-coercive and would be about informed consent.

This is about coercion. This is not about protection. This time last year, when nobody was vaccinated, indoor dining was open. I never bought the argument about a substantial meal for bars but in restaurants, people enter as a group, tend to stay in their own group, are seated at a certain distance apart and stay for a finite period of time because restaurants want to get in another sitting. That did not lead to any great increase in infections last year but this year we need more measures. We need to discriminate against those who are not vaccinated. What will it be next year?

If you had listened to the people on the Internet or social media last year predicting this, you would have called them conspiracy theorists but it has come to pass. Now I wonder what will the Government introduce next. The one thing I know is that human rights will not be a consideration. The Government minions will do whatever they have to do to keep the party whip. There will be no let-up until the next election. That much is clear. I will make a prediction. At the next election we will have Covid. We will have a variant that is coming in from somewhere. It will be a variant that we are very concerned about. By definition, if the next variant is to overtake the previous one it has to be more infectious so it will be more infectious than the Delta variant. We will have a lot more restrictions. We will have a lot more discrimination. We will possibly have discrimination for access to education. We will not have got rid of Covid, however. What we will have done is to have removed all personal choice.

I have probably been in too many bars in my life. I have been in some restaurants. I have never been press-ganged or dragged into any of them against my will. I have left bars because I did not feel comfortable in them for various reasons. That is still a possibility for people. When will the Government allow personal choice? When will people be able to assume the risk that is proportionate to them and their circumstances? We cannot regulate society to death in a vain attempt to prevent death because unfortunately we will not prevent death and nor will we prevent the pandemic spreading, unfortunately.

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