Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Storm Barra is raging outside and bringing significant disruption to families, workers and businesses, especially in those counties under red and orange warnings. Today and tonight, people need to stay safe. No one should take chances or risks. It is important that we pay tribute to our front-line workers. After 18 months of heroism, they now find themselves in the eye of the storm, again risking their own safety to keep us safe and the show on the road. We thank them.

Our children are not in school today because of this exceptional storm. We are now in winter and our children and teaching staff have been freezing in classrooms wearing hats and scarves during the school day, with windows wide open in an attempt to keep them safe. We are nearly two years into this pandemic, but the Government has still not delivered a plan for proper ventilation in our schools. It has been clear for some time that high-efficiency particulate air, HEPA, filters have an important role to play in ensuring schools have clean air. They remove contaminants and viruses from the air and help reduce airborne transmission in classrooms with poor ventilation. The WHO, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, ECDC, and the Government's own expert group on ventilation have emphasised the value of HEPA filters in keeping schools safe. Instead of listening to this expert advice and installing HEPA filters in schools, the Government's approach is, as the Taoiseach put it at his press conference on Friday, to open the windows and so on.

Parents and school staff must have been shaking their heads in disbelief. This refusal to act on filtration in schools reminds us of the Government's reticence to accept the advice on mask wearing at the start of the pandemic and its failure to incorporate antigen tests until the eleventh hour in the fight against Covid. We again see no sense of urgency, no forward planning and no common sense from the Government on the issue of ventilation in schools.

It has been known for some time that Covid is an airborne virus and we knew that schools would be a greater challenge in the face of a more transmissible variant. The rates of infection among school-aged children have shot up in recent months. The writing is on the wall and the Government has had ample time and every opportunity to get things right, yet it has wasted these opportunities.

In December last year, Deputy Ó Laoghaire called on the Minister for Education to ensure that schools were provided with devices over the Christmas break to make sure children returned to safely ventilated classrooms last January. He was ignored. Indeed, it took nine months for the Government to act on CO₂monitors. These monitors are badly needed but they do not clean the air. They have to be backed up with a filtration system. We do not have another nine months to wait for the Government to get HEPA devices into classrooms.

Tá sé thar am anois chun a bheith dáiríre faoi aeráil cheart sna scoileanna agus ag coinneáil páistí agus baill fhoirne sábháilte. Tá sé thar am ag an Rialtas scagairí HEPA a fháil i seomraí ranga chomh tapa agus is féidir.

Does the Taoiseach accept we must move beyond opening windows as a plan for ventilation in school and will he commit to immediately commencing the installation of HEPA filters in classrooms?

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