Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

It is very interesting that we are having this debate in regard to the hospitality industry when the fact is that most people who have died thus far from Covid in the State died in either a nursing home or a hospital, two settings that are either run, owned or managed by the Government. In the past hour, I gave the Minister's colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, a document showing that the National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, put money in front of nursing homes and instructed them to take a large surge of hospital transfers in March 2020. Research conducted by Catherine Fegan of the Irish Independentrevealed that patients were discharged from hospitals wholesale during the early months of 2020. In March that year, 1,363 patients were transferred to nursing homes from hospitals, a number that was higher than in any previous year.

The context is important here. Two days before issuing the NTPF letter on 10 March 2020, the Minister's Department issued a statement that restrictions around visitations to nursing homes were not necessary. Nursing homes had voluntarily closed their doors to avoid Covid spread but were, in effect, instructed to reopen. Two days later, a letter was issued to them saying that the Government wanted to clear old people out of hospitals and place them in nursing homes. What has happened since is history. In excess of 2,000 people died of Covid in nursing homes. Of the 1,300 patients transferred from hospitals to nursing homes in March last year, how many of them died of Covid-19? Where was the logic in emptying hospitals, filling nursing homes to the gills with the most vulnerable people at the start of a global pandemic and then instructing those nursing homes not to close their doors to visitors? Why did the Government and the HSE do this? The Dáil sits for the last time tomorrow before the summer recess. The Minister should make no mistake about it that we will spend every hour during the recess researching what happened to our most vulnerable citizens in nursing homes. There must be a full public inquiry into this matter without delay.

I have never seen anything as unique as this Bill in all my life. There is no Bill I have seen that comes close to this one in terms of how different and illogical it is. I have never before seen a Deputy or Minister stand up in the Dáil and make a blatant argument for discrimination. Without making any bones about it, the Minister has called for discrimination between two sectors of Irish people. The Bill is also unique because what it proposes to do is being done nowhere else. Sometimes in this country we have a blinkered view of the rest of the world. We think we are an open, outward-looking country but indoor dining and hospitality are not closed anywhere else at this time. We are having a circular, insular conversation all the time in this country. Nowhere else has it been decided to introduce a pass system where the only threshold is a requirement to be vaccinated. Other countries have included some form of testing because they realise that not to do so is blatantly discriminatory. Even when the travel certificate was being discussed at European level, it was obvious from the start that there was no way it would gain traction unless that discriminatory element was deleted and provision for testing was introduced.

I would like the Minister to respond to a particular point. It has been reported that people can come to Ireland on a travel certificate and access hospitality here, even though that certificate may have been given on the basis of a test, but an Irish person will not be able to do the same. I would greatly appreciate if the Minister could clarify that. I would not be surprised if it is true given that this Bill is so littered with contradictions.

I have never before seen a Government outsource decision-making wholesale to an unelected third party. NPHET has very narrow terms of reference and, in fairness, it is carrying out those terms of reference to the best of its ability. Its only function is to tackle Covid. Everybody here, as an elected representative, has far broader terms of reference. They include provision for Covid, cancer care, mental heath, heart disease and stroke, as well as incomes, poverty and all the other issues affecting society. The Government has outsourced its decision-making in a way that has never happened before. This is unworkable legislation. It is a gallery of contradictions and it is impossible to implement.

There is another issue on which I would like clarification from the Minister. It was reported in the news today that some hospitality staff will have to identify visually whether a QR code is real because not all businesses will have a scanner. If that is correct, we will see people on O'Connell Street buying and selling QR codes at five for a tenner. There is no way there is going to be any regulation in that regard. Given that generations of students aged under 21 who went to the US on a J1 visa were able to make changes to photocopied passports to enable them to drink alcohol in pubs, the Minister can bet his bottom dollar that if there is no proper scanning process for QR codes, the system will not hold water. It will be a laughing stock if that happens.

I urge the Minister, even at this stage, to reconsider what he is proposing and take the advice of the European Union, which was given seven months ago, to introduce antigen testing. The same advice was given by my party a year ago and it was also contained in the Ferguson report. Doing so would remove the discriminatory element of these provisions. It is young people, in the main, who will be discriminated against under these proposals. They will be able to work in a premises serving customers food and drink but they will not be allowed to socialise on that premises. As I said earlier, they will be able to go to a wedding in a hotel across the road to drink and eat all day long but they will not be able to attend a confirmation celebration in their parents' back garden with a dozen other people. I will be able to fly to Copenhagen without a vaccination, have a slap-up meal in a restaurant there and then return home but I cannot go my local to do the same thing.

I honesty believe that if the intellect of the Government was orientated toward designing a more contradictory solution, it could not have managed to do better than what has been devised in this Bill. The reason this is happening is that the Government is trying, again and again, to reinvent the wheel and is coming up with a triangle. Every single country in Europe is doing the right thing. I am asking the Government to do the same. I will conclude now to make way for other speakers.

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