John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Deputies opposite are entitled to constructively criticise the Government and to oppose the Government but if ever the country needed some semblance of the centre to hold, it is now.

All Government decisions in the past year and a half have been predicated on science. When science starts to contradict itself that creates problems. When scientists say schools are safe and they then say they never said that, that creates the kind of chink that the people who were outside this House today need. It cannot happen. When circulars are issued with blunt language, probably unknown to the Minister for Education, Deputy Foley, for whom I have huge admiration, the Minister then has to go out and give the practical, reasonable, real Government response to the public that we trust our schools to deal with the issue of masks and children and to make the right decisions and be sensitive to the needs of those children around whom we need to be sensitive. I accept that this week some of those issues created a degree of panic and uncertainty. When we have gymnastics by science on antigen testing, again that leads to the kind of fraught responses that we have had this week. When schools receive a circular stating, "This is a requirement and it must be enacted tomorrow morning", that is not helpful. In those circumstances, it can sometimes be helpful for Government to state that if sometimes its messaging appears confusing, a little inconsistent or even contradictory, it is because we are in the teeth of something we have never faced before.

Ours is not a perfect world and I ask colleagues, in all reasonableness, whether they could do better. Will they ask themselves which measures they would not have implemented? Would they stand over all the statements they have made over the past year? I read reports in the media today about the Government losing the room. I ask those journalists to examine the column inches that were published in the past 18 months and consider whether they would stand over all of them now. The Government is made up of human beings who are dependent on scientific advice in the teeth of a pandemic involving a virus we cannot even see and that keeps mutating and evolving.

The Minister knows I have a huge amount of respect for him because he keeps calm. I have not seen him lose the head under all the pressure and burden of decision-making that is on him and his colleagues. He should remember the conclusion of the poem from which the following lines are taken:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...

He should hold that to his heart. There is a lot of anxiety out there but I ask the Opposition to be measured in its response. There is a responsibility on it, too, in this fraught time. The Government will make the decisions it has to make in the best interests of the people. It does not always get it right, and that is pointed out really quickly when that happens, but I ask colleagues seriously whether they could do any better. I wish the Minister and his colleagues well in the decisions they have to make. I take the points, as I know he will, about the need to communicate those decisions a little more clearly. Sometimes people issue stuff that is outside the realm of the Government, which must then respond to it.

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