Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The extension of these extraordinary powers for a further three months will impact gravely the normal conduct of life in society. It will also impact the fundamental civil rights of every citizen in 2022, with no guarantee the Government will not move to introduce new laws at that stage to extend the curtailment even further. When the Government introduced these emergency powers, we were told they would be subject to ongoing review and would be repealed if circumstances allowed and when the vaccination rates exceeded the 70% threshold. However, we have not had any published review of the impact of these measures at all. Furthermore, our vaccination rate, which was pushed as the silver bullet, has far exceeded the herd immunity rate of 70% the Government endorsed, yet the Government now wants to curtail people's freedoms indefinitely, it would appear.

This Government has shown that everything it touches becomes a mess. It has let our fisherman and farmers down. It has let our cancer patients and those suffering with mental health down. It is defunding our roads and adding to the national debt every single day while increasing taxes on every citizen. That same Government wants us to support another extension to the emergency powers in order that it can continue to restrict travel to and from Ireland, restrict travel within Ireland, stop gatherings from taking place and close premises such as schools and businesses when it wants to do so. I for one am certainly against that.

I am not in any doubt that this virus is an extremely dangerous one and I always encourage people to sanitise and be extremely careful going about their day-to-day duties. Most people are, but people need to be worked with and not dictated to. What people want is to be continuously properly reminded and so on but not dictated to, and this is a form of dictating to people. It is also a handy way of taking the eye off the ball. The real ball in my locality has been the fact that there is no SouthDoc service in Castletownbere. We also had the issue in Bantry General Hospital where consultants were not there for 19 or 20 days during the summer. Those are the real issues. The other issue is the eye off the ball as to where the endoscopy unit for Bantry General Hospital is. It was promised to the people three and four years ago - nothing. There is not a sod turned. Look at Clonakilty Community Hospital. Has the funding been available to the hospital for its extension so it can be brought up to HIQA standards? That is what we need to concentrate on.

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