Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It would be more comfortable. My foot is sore today.

I will state categorically that People Before Profit will not be supporting this legislation. We opposed the renewal of these measures in the past and we are opposing them again. They are to be extended to March and possibly beyond. We are opposing them because we do not trust the Government with these laws, nor do we any longer have hope that it will do the right thing in a manner that will build and maintain social solidarity throughout the pandemic and secure public health.

In 2020, our citizens responded to the health measures with admirable social solidarity. They respected lockdowns, they respected social distancing and they took care of one another. We now have a very high vaccination rate. The Minister went through the figures - more than 91% are fully vaccinated and the partially vaccinated represent, I believe, 95%. Of the 5% of people who remain unvaccinated, a large cohort are marginalised communities to whom the Government could do much more to reach out in an attempt to educate and convince them it is the right thing to do.

I disagree with people who are opposed to vaccinations, but I do not scapegoat them. They are not the largest part of the problem, particularly given that our society has such a high level of fully vaccinated people. The pandemic is still spreading. That is not the fault of the unvaccinated, yet this legislation could scapegoat them.

The majority of people support vaccinations. We saw the queues last week when it was announced that boosters would be available in places like Citywest. The queues were enormous. People waited nearly five hours to get their boosters. They are enthusiastically embracing the vaccination programme. As such, the situation cannot be framed as the unvaccinated being the problem.

I wish to discuss what I view as a much wider problem. To start with the global issue, there is a major problem in the spread of the variants. Delta and, lately, Omicron have become frightening. I watched a newsreel about South Africa today. South Africa's hospitals are being overwhelmed, mostly by young patients. However, that is not the result of a biological evolutionary process in the virus alone. It is also the result of private ownership of the pharmaceutical industry and its drive to increase its profits at all costs. South Africa, other countries and the WHO have repeatedly asked to lift the patents on these vaccines to enable countries to control the virus in their own way and produce vaccines across the developing world. Tragically, this Government has enthusiastically supported the EU in backing the global pharmaceutical industry in its refusal to remove the patents.

This is the most brutal case of putting profit before the health of the population of the world. Now we have a greater pool of unvaccinated people in the developing world, which gives the virus more and more scope to mutate.

I heard the remarks of Deputy Lahart about how the Government has followed the science and taken the advice at every step. That is just not true. Last Christmas, clear advice was given to the Government that it could choose to open up the economy or allow people to visit each other's homes over the Christmas period, but it could not do both. What did it do? The Government did both. It ignored the advice. That has led to a further lockdown and endangering thousands of lives.

The failure to respond to the scientific evidence that Covid-19 is an airborne disease and the failure to legislate and regulate for cleaner air in all workplaces, most importantly, including schools, is outrageous. That was a choice. An expert group was set up and scientific advice was given, but the Government chose to ignore it. There have been shambolic and dangerous policies in schools. We have put at risk thousands of unvaccinated children, teachers, families, SNAs and other staff. Alongside the totally inadequate conditions, we stopped testing and tracing in schools, which was a deliberate policy to hide the number of cases.

There are incoherent and inconsistent policies around antigen testing. This should have been available from the start, but the Government has been dithering and procrastinating and is worried about the cost of it. These tests have become another excuse for rip-off Ireland. In Britain, France and Finland, those tests are free to people who are worried about being contaminated with Covid or those who are showing symptoms. In Portugal and Germany, they cost as little as €1 each. Here, they are as high as €8 each. It is rip-off Ireland all over again. There has been mixed and confused messaging that has undermined public confidence in public health measures like, dare I say it, golfgate and Merriongate. Despite that, people still responded in an overwhelmingly responsible manner.

The Government has failed us. It has failed to introduce a comprehensive national sick pay scheme. It has failed to increase hospital bed capacity or ICU capacity. It failed to pay student nurses and other student cohorts who worked so hard for us during the pandemic. We failed to give nurses more leave or to increase their pay and it is one of the main reasons we continually hear nurses talk about emigrating. We failed to take private hospital capacity into public ownership, despite vast sums of money being paid to those private entities. We failed with an ineffective and outsourced mandatory hotel quarantine system that has served as a racist theatre, where we single out countries from which people may or may not come freely into this country. Now, elected representatives are being asked to extend this legislation that will impact on people's rights without the parliamentary scrutiny or robust analysis other Deputies talked about.

The majority of people in this country will continue to do the right thing if they have confidence in the Government to maintain social solidarity, but that confidence is constantly being eroded, in particular by dishonest messaging. It was totally dishonest to talk about the schools being safe. Overnight, it has been replaced with a contradictory, unrealisable instruction to principals to take instruction on masks from the Department. I want to go into the issue in detail because this is worrying principals and teachers right across the country. I will read from a letter a deputy principal sent to the Minister for Education, Deputy Foley. The Minister will probably get sight of it:

I am concerned that the ambiguity surrounding the memo given to us leaves us in a very vulnerable position as a school. This memo issued as a pdf not on departmental paper and it is not at all signed. It is unclear under whose authority this has been issued. The memo states that we should refuse entry to schoolchildren, which is in stark contrast to all other circulars and statutory instruments regarding access to education. Usually there are protocols and procedures in place that involve discussions with parents and lengthy interventions before we would take such a drastic step as to exclude a child from school. Is this memo legally binding and if so, can you clarify its status in terms of legal instruments?

I am finished the quote. I am not directly asking the question myself, although it would be useful if it could be answered. I know not everybody is going to be able to see what I am holding, but I can and civil servants and Ministers here will be familiar with it. I have in my hand what an official memo from the Department looks like. It is on headed paper, it has Oireachtas written all the way across it and it is signed. What was sent out to the schools instructing them that where a medical certificate is not provided by a pupil, they will be refused entry into the school was not on headed paper and was not signed. It was not in the format that one could accept as a legally binding document. That must be urgently clarified to schools, parents and children.

I believe the recommendation for everybody who can, to mask up, is the right thing to do. People Before Profit sees it as part of a suite of measures that will help prevent the spread of the virus. I ask the Minister for Education, Deputy Foley, and the Minister for Health, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, if measures come in suites to help prevent the spread of the virus. I do not mean bags of sweets, I mean S-U-I-T-E-S. If they come as packages of things that we must do, then where are the high efficiency particulate air, HEPA, filters for schools? Science has told us that they help in the fight against the spread of an airborne virus. We will give the kids masks but not filters. We will give schools instructions to exclude kids, but we will not give them the testing and tracing that they need.

This heavy-handed approach, combined with the failure to heed the science has only served to increase anxiety and hesitancy. The powers given to the Garda in this legislation are also disproportionately applied and worrying. In May, we got figures for fines for fixed-payment notices issued by the Garda. At that time, of the 6,066 fines issued, almost half were issued in two Garda stations, Blanchardstown and Ballymun. This is obviously where the Garda were working the hardest – in working class areas, where 70% of those who were fined were under 35 years of age. The disproportionate application of those powers is extremely worrying. That is why we do not believe they should be extended. We should depend on the social solidarity and goodwill of people responding to a Government that seems to know what it is doing, but not to a Government that does not seem to know what it is up to.

In the same vein, how many managers of meat plants have been issued with fines for their failure to protect workers in those meat plants? Only last week we heard of an outbreak in a meat plant with 260 cases. The previous week we heard of a grant being given to the meat industry of €78 million, allegedly to help it through Brexit, but we could not spend €12 million on providing every classroom with a HEPAfilter. This week, the Government voted against giving those meat plant workers the right to a sick pay scheme that would help to keep them safe and would mean that they would not feel obliged to go into work and spread the virus when they had symptoms or when they were sick. What fines have been issued to directors and managers of nursing homes? The outbreaks in nursing homes are rising again. Where is the increased capacity in the Health and Safety Authority to inspect workplaces? We were told there is one extra inspector this year. The Government's strategy to quell the virus with practical measures is weak and instead it relies entirely on personal behaviour. There is a very good article in The Irish Timestoday. When I grow up I want to be able to write like Orla Muldoon. She is a professor at the Centre for Social Issues Research at the University of Limerick:

Eulogising personal responsibility is usually a counter-narrative designed to obscure systemic failures.

The failures in our systems are serious: an overburdened health service going back many years, a PCR testing system that cannot meet demand, a track and trace system that has not been able to keep up with the levels of reported infections, historically overcrowded classrooms where mitigations have been too long coming...

To continue with personal responsibility as a solution to the greatest crisis of our times is a political choice. It is also a shameful abdication of political responsibility and leadership.

I could not agree with her more. Covid-19 has brought into sharp relief the utter failure of the capitalist economic model to protect our health and the utter failure of this right-wing Government.

In the same breath as we seek to extend far-reaching powers, this Government has cut the pandemic unemployment payment to the bone and is due to end it completely as this legislation is extended. There is no intention in the legislation to reintroduce the eviction ban as we face into the winter. There is no intention to ban rent increases. There are no measures to deal with the energy crisis and the rising prices that people are facing while they are expected to stay at home longer. The only response to the energy crisis is for the Minister, Deputy Ryan, to announce this week that he is allowing the building of another seven gas-fired power stations to fuel data centres at a huge cost to the Exchequer.

I do not want to be all negative and I want to finish on what we could do. First, we need to replace the Government. We need to get rid of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and replace the Government with a genuine left-wing government that will defy the rules of the capitalist system and take measures that are necessary to protect people's health. We need to increase hospital capacity to reach the EU average level of beds per 1,000 of the population and increase the ICU capacity to 500 beds, given we only have 5.6 beds per 100,000 of population whereas the average in Europe is 12 ICU beds per 100,000. We need to bring staffing levels of public health teams up to the recommended levels as they are currently at one third of the recommendation, take private capacity of hospitals into public ownership and ensure an integrated, single-tier health system for Covid and non-Covid healthcare. We need to resource the test and trace infrastructure to ensure rapid access to testing, including walk-in test centres, free antigen tests and state-of-the-art contact tracing, restore the contact tracing in schools in full, and work with teachers and their unions to help resolve the staffing crisis in the schools. We need to establish legal minimum requirements for ventilation and air filtration in our workplaces and provide resources to ensure this happens. We need to pay the nurses, midwives and student nurses, and abolish the fees they must pay to enter college to have these careers. We need to speed up the booster vaccine programme, with priority for the vulnerable elderly, healthcare workers and those areas of our society where there is low vaccine coverage. Most important, we need to demand a waiver on the intellectual property rights of vaccine production. We need to restore the PUP for those losing their jobs and their earnings because of any new advice that may come out today. Ultimately, we have to move away from the disgraceful health service we have lived with for decades and increase our capacity to a system where we always have about 20% of overhead in case of emergency.

They might seem like way-over-the-top socialist policies but that is what we need to do. That is why I say that if Covid has shown us anything, it is the utter failure of the capitalist mode of production and economic activity to protect the health of human beings on the planet.

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