Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Barry.

The socialist left is the only political force in Ireland that has consistently told the truth to people about Covid. That was epitomised by the discussion on the reopening of hospitality in November of last year, when the Government bowed to private business lobbying and reopened at the cost of more than 2,000 unnecessary, fully avoidable deaths. The rest of the Opposition went along with that and, in general, the approach in the course of the pandemic was to go along with the basic thrust of whatever the Government was doing, whatever lobbying was taking place, and then perhaps to pick this or that aspect to oppose to pose some form of opposition.

The same is happening right now. It is only we who are saying clearly that it is not safe to reopen indoor hospitality. That is not a truth we want to say or a situation we want to be in but it is the truth. Let us look at what is happening throughout the world. The figures from the Netherlands today show a 500% increase in the number of Covid cases in one week as a result of the reopening of indoor hospitality or with that as a key cause. What is very frustrating about that from our point of view is that the policies we advocated, namely, a zero Covid approach based on socialist policies that puts people's interests first, we would not be in these circumstances. We are faced with telling the truth to people about the difficult choices that need to be made, as a result of bad decisions taken again and again that put private profit first, when we could be in very different circumstances.

I want to be concrete about that; it is not some abstract point. Seven weeks ago, we first raised in the Dáil that we had a crisis on her hands with the spread of the Delta variant in Britain and we needed to do something to slow the spread. We said we needed to bring in mandatory hotel quarantine for England, Scotland and Wales. If we had done that five, six or seven weeks ago - even possibly four weeks ago - we would not be in the circumstances we are in today. We would not have to say it is not safe to reopen indoor hospitality. I warned the Taoiseach on 16 June that if the gamble not to introduce mandatory hotel quarantine did not pay off, we would be in a crisis, with negative consequences for people's health and long Covid, and there would be additional unnecessary deaths. Here we are at precisely that point.

We are opposed to the Government's mandatory hotel quarantine because it is ineffective, it is privatised and outsourced and it is not part of the public health system or under the democratic control and oversight of trade unionists, human rights and civil liberty activists and so on. In effect, without effective mandatory hotel quarantine, which would include proper quarantine of England, Scotland and Wales, we are left with a kind of racist theatre that has the pretence of doing something when, in reality, we have plague island next door, with Delta cases coming in freely, and we wonder why we are in the circumstances we are in.

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