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

I will speak briefly in support of all of these amendments, which add a modicum of democratic accountability to the significant power being given to the Minister. We favoured mandatory hotel quarantine at a certain point in time. We called for it to be introduced across the board as part of a public health system. We said it should not be outsourced and called for appropriate oversight to exist to ensure people’s civil liberties and human rights were not being contravened. We have now had the experience of the Government's version of mandatory hotel quarantine. It did quarantine in a partial way, with particular countries targeted and others not. It outsourced it en masseto private corporations. It was not part of a public health system - health service staff were not involved in it - and it did not take account of the serious issues raised about civil liberties and so on.

Here we are again. The Government has come back and said it wants the capacity to bring in mandatory hotel quarantine without having to come back to the Dáil, as is correctly proposed in these amendments. That is a real problem for us and we, therefore, oppose the Bill. What will be the purpose of this, especially now in this concrete situation? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it will be the Government engaging in theatre - potentially racist theatre - by saying it is doing something about this problem. This discussion has arisen in the context of the Omicron variant and all the talk about southern Africa. However, Omicron had been detected in 26 countries as of yesterday.

It could be up to 27 by now. Only three of those countries are in Africa, and the UK has the second highest number of detected Omicron cases in the world. However, the Government is not going to introduce mandatory hotel quarantine for the UK. That illustrates that the way in which this is going to be used, in the context of fortress Europe policies and so on, is extremely troublesome as regards the amount of power being given and the way it will be used to try to pretend we are doing something when we are not actually addressing the issues.

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