Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Excuse me. I am talking through the Chair.

I am wondering what is going on. The people are sick and weary of it. This is not the first time. I could speak about the Aughinish Alumina plant and the Geoghegan family in Limerick. They had issues with Dr. Holohan and the now Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin. There was no public inquiry into what happened. What about the cervical smear tests and many other issues? Mind games are being played now. A tweet was just sent to me with Dr. Holohan's statement this evening. Is what we do in the House irrelevant? NPHET is in charge. We have abdicated our responsibility to NPHET, the national immunisation advisory committee, NIAC, and God knows what other quango.

Under this legislation, the Minister will have the power to introduce via statutory instrument anything he dreams up. My concern has to do with the fact that these measures will be policed by 300 HSE staff, 70 Health and Safety Authority, HSA, staff, the Garda and whatever organisations, outfits or cabals the Minister dreams up for inclusion in the statutory instrument. Give them the badge and off they go like sheriffs and posses. As someone mentioned, they will probably only work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. because they will not be given overtime, but I am sure some of them will be zealous in catching people and earning stripes.

This is silly and pathetic nonsense. The Minister knows that because he used to say the exact opposite as he does now. He admitted in the Chamber a couple of months ago that we were right and that he would have been saying the same thing as us were he over here. He is on the record as saying that. What happens when people go into government? What power comes over them that makes their hands sign these measures and changes them so much overnight from questioning, engaging and being responsible? We all engaged in those meetings at first and backed every decision the Government took because we were all worried and frightened about what would happen, but then we saw the figures, which did not stack up anywhere, and the damage being done to our health services, for example, mental health services, late and missed cancer diagnoses, scoliosis procedures and a plethora of other services. People cannot get near a doctor or hospital. It beggars belief.

After the 15 or 16 months and the €4 billion spent on top of the existing €19 billion, we have just nine extra ICU beds. We keep locking down the country and crucifying small businesses and tens of thousands of jobs across all sectors because of an inadequate HSE and health service. If we keep this going on for much longer, we will not have an economy to recover. The Minister might say that I am a conspiracy theorist, but we are beholden to some greater power. It will be in charge and we will eat crumbs from its table. This is mad and is getting madder by the week.

The Bill is being rushed. The Rural Independent Group tabled 11 or 12 amendments, but not one will be taken. At least if amendment No. 1 is taken, people might have some hope that we are not in this for the real long haul and that, when October comes, the Minister will not have the ability to extend the measures for a further three months just as a matter of form. The extension would have to be put to the House, but the Government has its majority in the form of its three parties and some Regional Group Independents who will back it come hell or high water. I do not know whether that is because they expect to fall into government when the Green Party leaves or whatever, but they are in awe of the Government.

We had a great celebration last Sunday in Dublin Castle. I did not intend on principle. How could we celebrate our patriotic dead who got us our freedom, which we boast about and have thankfully enjoyed for nearly 100 years, at the same time as draconian and penal legislation for a medical apartheid was being drafted in some other office of the Attorney General and his staff? I am not naming the Attorney General personally. I am referring to the staff, the drafting people. The Government was down celebrating at Dublin Castle. What rank hypocrisy and sheer brass neck. It is a new low having those two events happening side by side and we are here four days later taking away people's rights.

People will be expected to declare their medical histories to get into hospitality even though, as Deputy Naughten said, they will be able to go to a cinema and get their Coca Cola and popcorn or whatever without a passport. Most of the cinema chains are very large as well. It is all about big business while all the small, home-grown, one-person and family businesses will be destroyed. Their workers will be forced to work even though they cannot get vaccinated, but if they want to have a social drink after they finish their shifts later in the evening, they will not be able to. They will have to go out onto the street to do so.

It is patent nonsense and the Minister should be ashamed to have anything to do with it, never mind signing the legislation. He will not give us any insight into the statutory instruments he might sign, but I say they will be interesting. We will not be here for six or seven weeks and there will be no account given to anyone, not that there is much accountability anyway. The power has been wrested from the Dáil. Actually, it has not been wrested from us, but given away by the Government to unelected cabals. Some of the people in them are certainly good in their own right, but when I asked Dr. Holohan in the Cabinet room - some of the Deputies present now were there on behalf of their groups - for a third time about the science around the closure of churches and the restrictions on numbers and the Taoiseach told him to answer me, he told me to listen, that we were dealing with a pandemic, that we would do the lockdown and that we would deal with the science later. I threw my hat at it. I have not been invited - to my knowledge, no party leader has - to any briefing since, and that was early November. The Government has lost the public and the Opposition groups, as will be seen in the vote, because it did not continue with the briefings and with informing us after the fear and the fog lifted and we wiped the glasses, put on the cap, got a chance to think and asked what really was happening and whether it was a merry dance. I am not making little of anyone who died. I also want a public inquiry - not done by people from Ireland, but from abroad - into the slaughter in the nursing homes and how people were afflicted in hospitals. I am not blaming the front-line staff. I am blaming the bad management and the fact that PPE could not be got for nursing homes. Oxygen that was en routeto nursing homes was diverted away from them. If someone does not go to the Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity for that, I will give up. What happened is a shocking indictment.

If we have another pandemic of any kind, we will have just nine extra ICU beds after all the money that was spent. The Minister should be proud of himself. Some €4 billion plus has been spent, and that is just the amount we know about. Yesterday, Deputy Connolly tried to elicit answers about the cost of the vaccination programme and the various procurement processes, but there has been no procurement process since Covid started. It is just a case of spending whatever with no accountability. People have rang me looking to find out where places were. They had been asked to do work by the HSE. They were told to get it done, to work night and day and that the price did not matter. The HSE threw caution to the wind. If we had a great deal of extra capacity or a new field hospital built, that would be great - China can build a hospital in one or two weeks - but we have only nine extra ICU beds to our credit for €4 billion.

In response to Be On Call for Ireland, thousands of people came home from abroad to offer their services free of charge. According to the figures I last got from the Minister, I believe that only a couple of hundred were taken on. People had the spirit of meitheal, ní neart go cur le chéile and so on. They wanted to help. Everyone got motivated and did his or her bit. "We are all in this together", but we are a long way away from that now. There are a few of you in it.

I have to ask the same question Deputy Danny Healy-Rae asked earlier. Why is the Government so against antigen testing? Do some people who are involved in the system or close to it have a vested interest in the other test? The name is gone from me now. It is the test everyone is doing. Every other country in Europe and all over the world is using the antigen test. We are talking about it. We are setting up an expert group to look at this test, 15 months on.

I asked the Minister in the Dáil yesterday if we would have an investigation. He told me three or four investigations were going on in different aspects of the HSE. I do not want that. I want an outside investigation - outside of this country and with no connection to the HSE or the Department of Health - and an independent inquiry as to how the Government and its advisers, NPHET, the HSE and the Department of Health have handled this crisis. Nothing else will satisfy because we have enough of cover-ups, a lack of inquiries and refusals. The Geoghegan family's blood samples were lost and Dr. Holohan refused to allow a public inquiry and sitting beside him that day was the then Minister for Health, Deputy Micheál Martin. That was a long time ago, in 2003-----

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