Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

When I spoke earlier this week - I think it was yesterday but I have lost track of time - I was weary and I forgot the word "anagram" in regard to Omicron, the new variant, which is further down the Greek alphabet. Inexplicably, we missed many of the letters and came to that one. The word "Omicron" as an anagram it means moronic. It was not I who came up with that but somebody who came into my office and shared her concerns with me. The word "moronic" is terribly derogatory, but there are many meanings to it, such as foolish, idiotic and stupid. Many of those words are characteristics of the Government over the past two years. I say that reluctantly and as someone who believes Covid has been extremely dangerous and that people have suffered from it, including all of our families, in one way or another, through not attending funerals, not being able to visit nursing homes and so on. It is unfortunate that we have to preface our comments with that. That is what we have come to in this country.

A pandemic was declared on 11 March 2020, having declared the outbreak of a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2021. The first case in Ireland was on 29 February 2020. It is important to say this because our memories dim after a while. As stated by Deputy McNamara - I was near him; I did not know him that well at the time and I would say I still do not know him but that is neither here nor there - I had a reluctance in passing the legislation because I feared what was going to happen with no oversight. I said there was no need for a committee because I foolishly thought the Dáil would retain session of this and monitor it. The next battle we had to fight was on the Business Committee, of which I am not a member but on which I sat for a number of sessions because Deputy Pringle was, I think, isolating at the time. There was a danger that even the Dáil would not sit and that we would get briefings. We went through all of that and then the Dáil sat for a day or two per week but with reduced numbers and all of that. That was the background.

At that time, the language was very inclusive, such as "We are all in it together." Very nice words were said at different times. The then Minister for Health, Deputy Harris, said: "We must protect the most vulnerable members of our society." The Tánaiste, Deputy Varadkar, then Taoiseach, said: "The question is how we can take what we have learned in recent weeks and some of the things we have done to build a better society in the aftermath of Covid-19, how we can honour the sacrifices made in every community in our country and renew our society by developing a new social contract." Deputy Donnelly, now the Minister for Health, said: "When we are considering powers as serious and extensive as this we must as an Oireachtas make sure there are checks and balances." The then Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar also said, "When faced with a common foe we can put aside our differences and work together for the good of the country." At the time, I expressed my own concerns, which I will not quote. I will stay in the present and look back. What happened to those lovely words and the "meitheal" that Deputy Mattie McGrath so often mentions, "the coming together", "bringing out the best in people" and "we are all in it together". It started to go very quickly, did it not? The 70 year olds were told to stay indoors. They were told in such a duplicitous way it was appalling. They were led to believe that it was an order, that it was in legislation from the Government when all the time it was not.

Indeed, when they dared to step out and go for a walk, we nearly had a situation where one neighbour was turned against the other. People would question others for being out and tell them they must stay inside. Does the Minister remember that? I remember it very well because it upset me at the time.

I am jumping forward and back in the timeline but the points I want to make are important. When the vaccinations arrived, people aged 60 to 69 were told to take AstraZeneca or leave it and go to the bottom of the list. Does the Minister remember that language? Then the language around the virus started to change. The virus was personified; it became nasty and vicious. The Minister referred to it yesterday, if I recall correctly, as "sinister", with reference to possible new variants. I do not think viruses are nasty, vicious or sinister. People and policies can be nasty and vicious but viruses cannot. By their very nature, they change and alter all the time. The experts told us from day one to expect alterations and variations. I do not have a science background but I read and try to understand the information. The new variant is no big change from what we should have been expecting. There will be constant variations.

There were also changes in the language around the distinction between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. For a while, it was very sweet and everybody was encouraged to come forward, which the vast majority did. Then, however, we started to demonise and discriminate against those who did not come forward, saying they were responsible for all the outbreaks. I even heard that today from a Labour Party Deputy, who keeps using this language around the unvaccinated, who are like the unwashed and responsible for all the problems. I fundamentally object to that type of language. It is not the way to deal with the threat facing us from Covid and the variations of the virus that are going to come. It is a public health problem and I will refer presently to some of the reasons it has overrun our country.

As I said, we demonised those who are not vaccinated, who are only a small group and never a homogenous one. There are many reasons, most of them acceptable, why a person might not take a vaccine. Then the facts made it difficult to continue demonising them, which I will come back to. In the meantime, Covid passports were brought in, not to restrict, supposedly, but to allow us to travel. However, the use of the passports was extended to other areas, with people needing them to go for a coffee or get their hair done. When people go into some coffee shops, they get a little card saying they have had two coffees today, making seven in total, and will soon get a complementary one. I am sure the Minister has seen the wrongs of the cards, with their tick marks, showing the number of Pfizer injections people have had. It raises the question as to whether he intends to have the Covid passport updated to include information on whether the holder has had the booster. I am posing these questions because they are points that should be up for discussion. At what point do we stop? Will it be at two boosters or five boosters? Will there be a distinction between the colleagues sitting behind me if one has the booster and the other does not? Will one be able to go into a coffee shop and have coffee there and the other will not? Next year, when another variant arrives, will we up the requirement again for a Covid passport, which was supposed to be a temporary measure? None of these questions has ever been discussed in this House.

I welcome the 20 minutes I have been given to contribute to this debate, as I welcomed the time I was given yesterday. It is very important to have this time to discuss the legislation. However, it was published only in the past few days. As we struggle to work through the Bill - rightly so; it is my job as a parliamentarian to do so - the Taoiseach is outside giving a statement to the media, members of which already know what it contains and have already been prepped. The only uninformed people are the Deputies in this august Chamber struggling with legislation that will give the Minister unfettered powers until next March and potentially until June. The Taoiseach did not see fit, almost two years into a pandemic, to come in and talk to the elected Members of the Dáil and inspire confidence in us in order that we can go out and inspire confidence in our constituents and explain why all of this is happening.

The Government repeated the mantra that schools were safe and I believed it. Now we are masking children. When the discriminatory talk about the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated was wearing thin, we moved on to children. Now the children are the greatest problem. The children who get Covid but have no symptoms are being treated as the greatest threat, not in order to protect other children but to protect adults. I am no expert in this but I have a difficulty with the message changing all the time. In fact, the message seems to have more variations than the virus, with very serious consequences for our democracy. On testing and tracing, schools have repeatedly pointed out that it was stopped. The Minister, Deputy Donnelly, and the Minister for Education said it did not happen, but it did and there were consequences to it.

I raised the question with the Minister this morning as to the distinction between somebody who has been vaccinated and somebody who has had Covid and has been certified as such. I am still none the wiser other than that there is an EU regulation that says the immunity applies only for six months. I have gone through all the letters from NPHET to the Minster and it is stated more than once that the advice from HIQA to NPHET, which the latter accepted, is that the period of immunity is nine months. Can the Minister explain why he has accepted and cited ad nauseamadvice from NPHET and HIQA but not on this point, with no information or analysis as to why?

I have a difficulty with the bellicose and warlike language that is being used, mostly by men, with honourable exceptions. This is not a war. It is a public health crisis arising from a very serious virus that is threatening our health, which comes on top of a public health system in which hospitals were already creaking at the seams, a primary care system that is non-existent and a public health infrastructure in which public health doctors are nowhere to be seen. We had the Crowe Horwath report from 2018 or 2019 identifying the deficiencies in our public health system. Other than the Minister coming in here and rattling off numbers, such as there being 2.2 extra doctors here or there or something like that, I am none the wiser as to what steps have been taken in a public health crisis to put public health doctors, nurses and experts in place to instil trust in communities.

There are very few extra hospital beds and the total is way below what was set out in various capacity reviews, including the review of ICU beds. We are none the wiser in regard to private hospitals, what deal has been done, how much it is costing and why they have not been used to more capacity. I do not have time to go through the details I have of waiting lists for people in Galway, including pain lists and orthopaedic lists of two and three years in length. Home help provision is non-existent in Connemara. The private company cannot provide any more home helps for many reasons, Covid being one of them. We have commercialised and made a product of our health system. That was being done for years and along came Covid on top of it.

Then we have the warlike language of adding more tools to our armour to fight the battle on the front line. Nurses and doctors have done great work, but so have the cleaners who struggled to keep our hospitals clean and the porters who have run from ward to ward and from ward to X-ray department without enough trolleys. When we pay tribute to nurses and doctors, I would prefer if we paid tribute to all the people involved in our health system, who were struggling well before Covid and will struggle well after it until we recognise that we cannot continue to have what we currently have in this country, which is a private system supported by public money and used to undermine completely the public health system. Recently, a person I know went to Merlin Park University Hospital, which is set on 150 acres.

We should be building a state-of-the-art new hospital at Merlin Park University Hospital for the million people whom the hospital serves. That person went as a public patient for a scan, paid by public money, to a private facility on public lands in Merlin Park University Hospital. Such is the complexity of what we have done with the private system into the public system in Ireland, it is extremely difficult to disentangle it.

The Minister will ask what has that got to do with all of this. This determined how we dealt with Covid-19, when it came along. It was difficult for all of us because it was new, but as the years went by - and it has now been years because we are in the second year of the pandemic - we did not learn. When I say “we”, I mean the Government and NPHET, which is not what any properly representative committee should be in terms of mental health, nursing homes and so on.

During that time, we tried to learn because we set up an all-party committee. Deputy McNamara, who is sitting behind me, was the Chair. I took the trouble of reading its report. It made many recommendations. It even published an interim report with 22 recommendations. The report talked about many things, including nursing homes and how an inquiry was necessary. Nothing has happened of course. We have completely ignored a cross-party committee that made recommendations that were practical, and that were not way out. I do not think the Minister has ever come in and answered why the recommendations were ignored.

This legislation seeks to put four pieces of legislation together. In theory, I have no difficulty with that. It is much better to have one piece of legislation as long as we ensure we have enough time to speak about it and its implications. However, there has been no input from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, into this legislation. It has not been run by it nor by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC. There is an obligation on the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission to look at all legislation that has implications for human rights. It has been utterly ignored.

I almost did not speak today. I was truly weary of hearing my own voice all over again on this. I am sure the feeling is shared by all the Members on this side of the House. How do we keep saying this? How do we get across that we want to work with the Government? We see Covid-19 as serious, but the restrictions on fundamental human freedoms going into their second year without any analysis is totally unacceptable and is the most serious threat to our democracy.

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