Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

We in Aontú will be opposing the extension of this legislation. We are the only political party in the Chamber that has opposed each extension of these measures. Governance of this country is at a low ebb. It is incredible that even today, details of NPHET's proposals concerning potential restrictions were leaked to the media before that information was even given to the Government. Nobody thought of giving that information to the Opposition to allow us to look at these recommendations. Now we have a situation whereby the Opposition has been forced to learn about these restrictions through the media. The democratic structures of this State right now are an afterthought. Will the Government do anything about the leak? Absolutely not. How can a Government that has been built on leaks do anything about leaks from other organisations?

It is important to state that there is good news. The hospitalisation figures regarding Covid-19 are falling. We would not know this currently by the narrative that is out there, but thankfully the numbers of those requiring care in ICUs and hospitalisation more generally are down. The incidence of the virus is highest among the very young, but there is good news there as well. The damage done to the very young is thankfully low. Nobody under the age of 14 has died from Covid-19 in the last two years in this State.

For 19 months, in fairness to the Government as well, it also made the point that young people were protected from the worst aspects of this virus. However, for some strange reason, the Government has significantly flipped its message in the last four weeks. The truth of the matter is that Covid-19 is going nowhere fast. Whether they are vaccinated or not, most people in this country are likely to get Covid-19. We need to be careful and we must protect the vulnerable. The best way to do that, though, is by creating hospital capacity. Inaction with regard to capacity is one of the biggest threats to the protection that can be afforded to people with Covid-19 in this State, as well to the 1 million people on the waiting lists for treatment. The differential between the number of ICU beds that exist and the number there should be is 260. That is double the number of ICU beds taken up by people with Covid-19. The lack of Government investment, therefore, is a bigger threat to ICU capacity than Covid-19, and that is saying something.

In addition, regarding hospital capacity, some 70,000 people applied to the Be on Call for Ireland campaign. People came home from Australia and elsewhere to help with human resources and hospital capacity, but only 400 of those people were employed. That is an incredible thing. No matter what kind of marketing bumf we get from the Minister opposite, the truth of the matter is that the dial has hardly been moved when it comes to increasing healthcare capacity.

One of the other big issues in this regard has been access to antigen testing at specific venues. We in Aontú have been calling for that for more than a year. It is one of the biggest failures of this Government. It has been talking about it for 14 months, and has been refusing to decide. When it finally did make decisions in this regard, it then quickly U-turned, and finally outsourced the matter of antigen testing to Lidl and Aldi.

Nursing homes and hospitals have been at the epicentre of the Covid-19 crisis in this State. The majority of people who have died in this State have caught Covid-19 in a hospital or nursing home. These are two areas for which the Minister is directly responsible. It is incredible. We have brought much information to light in this regard. In the first six months of 2020, some 10,000 people were moved from hospitals into nursing homes. The advice at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic was to stop visitors going into nursing homes, but the Government overturned that. For another month, visitors were circulating in nursing homes.

We have called for an investigation regarding this matter, but the Government has refused. Therefore, we in Aontú have drafted a Bill and submitted it. We hope to be able to speak to it soon. It is intended to facilitate the setting up of an investigation into what happened in the nursing homes. We must remember that more people died in nursing homes and hospitals than in any other institutions since the founding of this State. There must be an investigation into this issue.

Instead of building capacity and doing the simple things right, such as air filtration, PCR tests and contact tracing, something else has happened.

The Government has leaned on the people of Ireland with great cost and look at what it has done. It has been a complete Horlicks in a range of matters from the very start. We had the €9 meal we were told was safer than €8 meals and pubs had to keep records of meals sold for 28 days. There were calls to bring in the Army to control students. There was a limit of ten people at a funeral in the largest buildings in town when dozens of people were in queues for wine and crisps in the shops directly opposite. We had people able to drink pints while standing in public spaces but not allowed to do it sitting down, and this led to riot police charging at people a couple of streets away from this Dáil Chamber. We heard debates on whether socks were essential items of clothing and saw nightclubs closed.

Incredibly, parents, teachers and students were given a 16-hour space in which to implement a diktat putting masks on nine-year-old children. The idea the Government would refuse education to a nine-year-old child with glasses who cannot see when wearing a mask because the spectacles fog up is absolutely incredible. There is the nonsense of being able to get a Covid-19 test in this State before travelling abroad and the same test allowing re-entry into the country. The Zappone Merrion Hotel affair also demonstrated the rules were for the little people and not the Government. The Government has been a fiasco factory for over 18 months. It has relied on yo-yo restrictions over and back and they have caused enormous damage to the fabric of our society. Everywhere we look, people are afraid because of what is happening in this country.

Covid-19 is going nowhere and we must live with it. That means we must do our best to protect life but also do our best to keep society open. We are being told to follow the science but every time I put in a question, I am told there is none. I asked NPHET if any research was done on the Covid-19 pass but it said there was not. The Covid-19 pass lets people into hospitality who have Covid-19 and can stop people who do not have Covid-19 from using the hospitality. It is incredible. I asked the Government a week ago now if there was any evidence to support the mandatory wearing of masks by young children in schools but none has been forthcoming.

I know the Minister is busy but I ask him to listen to the facts. I have information, some of which is from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre website. Additional data have been released to me as well. In the past four weeks there were 26 outbreaks in nursing homes, 81 outbreaks in hospitals, 27 outbreaks in residential centres for people with disabilities and seven outbreaks in refuges for women. In the same period there were three outbreaks in hotels, four outbreaks in pubs and two outbreaks in restaurants. Right now there are 20 times more outbreaks in hospitals than there are in pubs in this State. That information was given to me by the Minister's Department and it contains such damning figures. Again, the locations where people should be most protected are those where probably the most damage is happening in the State.

I only have a little time left. Unfortunately, the Minister is presiding over a crumbling health service while pontificating to struggling small and medium-sized enterprises, including pubs and restaurant owners etc., on keeping people safe.

If we want to reduce infection rates in hospitals, we must start introducing antigen tests for people wishing to access those hospital buildings. The problem is the Government is blind to such possibilities. It was going to wind up NPHET a month ago and Mr. Paul Reid said in August that when we hit a 20% vaccination rate, the whole country would open. The truth is the level of transmission between those who are vaccinated is far higher than expected. The vaccine has absolutely done tremendous work in reducing the level of damage caused by the illness with respect to mortality and morbidity but it has not stopped transmission. The Government has not taken this into consideration with its current policies and actions. We must introduce antigen testing to replace the Covid-19 pass so we can reduce the level of illness in hospitals.

The Government has gotten away with its actions in large part because the Opposition has been atrocious over the past while. Sinn Féin sat on the fence for almost two years, afraid to make a mistake while it waits to be part of the Government. The smaller parties have gone down a zero Covid cul-de-sac from the start. The Social Democrats, for example, said the country should not open until we get to a level of fewer than ten cases per day. It is an incredible figure and if the policy had been followed, the country would never have opened at all. It is incredible the country's smallest and newest political movement in this Dáil has provided the strongest opposition to the disastrous policies from this Government.

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