Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am glad the Government is not opposing our Bill on ventilation and the need for clean air in workplaces, but we need more than that. We need critical urgency in taking on this issue and legislating for a proper level of ventilation, air filtration and clean air standards. There are two ways to respond to a pandemic. It is understandable when we are facing a new situation that there are many knee-jerk responses, we do not quite know what we are dealing with, and emergency measures taken at short notice are inevitable. We are two years into the pandemic and we have learned a lot. Critically, we now know that this is an airborne disease. The question of how we prevent the transmission of Covid-19 through the air is critical. To put it in stark and simple terms, unless we address that, we are not going to bring this pandemic to an end. The doom loop of restrictions, widespread illness and the threat of our hospitals being overrun will continue.

The facts are stark. I commend Orla Hegarty for pulling together the facts about this and championing the arguments. She puts it starkly when she says that, given that we now know that this is an airborne disease, the way to tackle it is not about what individuals do but about what happens in buildings. There is a stark concentration of superspreading events in particular types of buildings. More than half of the people who died as a result of Covid-19 were infected in just 0.3% of buildings. That is really stark. That allows us to target our approach to dealing with the virus, if we absorb the significance of that fact. Other facts further corroborate this point. Half of workplace outbreaks have been in just 150 buildings. Infection in overcrowded private homes is twice the rate of in uncrowded homes.

One in four school buildings has had a Covid-19 index case in the past four months. That nails the ridiculous lie that the Government persisted with, as Deputy Bríd Smith and others said, that schools were not a vector for Covid transmission. It was ridiculous and everybody knew it. We knew that overcrowded spaces of any kind were places where transmission was taking place, yet the Government persisted with this nonsense. There now has been a swing to the opposite end of the spectrum where all the burden of trying to address the crisis is being loaded onto the schools. It is all about the schools now. It was apparently not happening in schools at all before and now it is all about the schools. I support the idea that children should wear masks. However, I do not think it is sensible to talk about excluding kids from school, if they are distressed by that, have not been fully convinced, do not fully understand, or are caught between parents and the school when their parents are resistant. I would drop any discussion of excluding kids from school and putting that on teachers.

Now we have finally admitted that schools are a setting in which the virus transmits and is likely to transmit, for the obvious reasons. There are large numbers of people in overcrowded buildings. Many of them are poor quality buildings and, disgracefully, many are prefabricated units. They are some of the most overcrowded classrooms in Europe. Is it a surprise that airborne disease is likely to transmit in those kinds of environments? Of course it is not.

It happens in other similar environments, often in the face of Government denial for a long time. Deputy Bríd Smith has just given me some facts she got from Orla Hegarty last night, which underline this. There is currently a meat plant outbreak with 240 cases of infections, as there have been throughout the pandemic. They are closed, overcrowded environments with poor ventilation. There are currently 52 nursing home outbreaks. One home has 64 infections. Fifty-three children have been hospitalised in the past two weeks, a number which has more than doubled in one month. Cases among children are 20 times what they were last year. It is all happening in certain types of buildings which are overcrowded, have poor ventilation, no air filtration, and so on. Orla Hegarty points out that in 1918, during the Spanish flu, Chicago suppressed the pandemic by making ventilation a condition of trading in workplaces, during a terrible pandemic that claimed 30 million lives globally.

Deputy Paul Murphy's analogy is absolutely right. He stated that addressing the lack of clean water was critical to wiping out certain types of disease. Even here in Ireland, tuberculosis was addressed by the regulation, to some degree, of overcrowded in housing. Tuberculosis was rampant in overcrowded conditions, in other words, among the poor in overcrowded, poor quality housing. Is what needs to be done, how urgent it is, and that we have the science to do it starting to get through to the Government?

It is not just about what the health professionals say. If it is in certain types of buildings with poor ventilation, air filtration and so on, we need to listen to the people who know about buildings. It is about how to manage the transmission of air within buildings and there are people who know this - people like architects, people like Orla Hegarty and people who have developed air filtration systems that can filter the molecules that carry Covid-19.

Against that background, what the Minister said last night on television was simply unbelievable. He was asked why HEPA filters should not be put in schools. They are not very expensive. We could put them in every single school in the country for €12 million. Germany has spent €200 million on HEPA filters. He said "No", because of what our advice is telling us. I do not know what exactly his advice is telling him but he said that we are not doing it. We will instead open the windows in the midst of winter. Some of the stuff that was sent out by the Minister for Education on ventilation and opening windows in the depths of winter is unbelievable. One piece of advice stated that if it was really cold, teachers should open the window slightly near where the radiator is. Our kids have a choice between freezing in the cold or getting Covid-19 in overcrowded situations.

This is not directly to do with air filtration and ventilation, but added to this issue is the failure to maintain contact tracing in schools. That is, of course, linked to the understaffing and resourcing of public health teams to follow it up. That is why the Government did not do continue with contact tracing. It had nothing to do with any public health advice. It was because we do not have proper public health teams to follow up. We also do not have temperature checks. Why are there not temperature checks in schools? When you go to certain radio stations in this city to do interviews, there are temperature checks on the way in. Why do we not have them in schools? Critically, why do we not deal with overcrowding in schools?

Healthcare and hospitals are the other big issue. One of the worst hit groups are healthcare workers, who we need to combat this pandemic, and it is precisely because many of our hospital buildings are poorly ventilated and old. They need refurbishment. Our healthcare workers do not have proper protection. I hope the Minister for Health gets the message and progresses this Bill as soon as possible because if we do not address this issue we will not get on top of Covid-19.

See this speech in context