Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Many members of the public felt blamed yesterday, even though it was not their fault. There is a system failure. The Taoiseach needs to find ways of fixing that system so that we are not duplicating, being wasteful and people are not queueing longer than they need to, which is one of the reasons they might be put off in the winter and will make alternative arrangements. The Taoiseach needs to give us an assurance about those systems because there is a problem there. The HSE has acknowledged that.

I know we cannot be certain about things because they will change, but an indicative vaccination plan across cohorts and vaccination types would be very helpful as we go into the new year. For example, the Janssen vaccine becomes less protective in a reasonably short period of time. We need to see that plan before Christmas. The public would find a degree of reassurance in that, especially given what the Taoiseach said about Omicron.

On the trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, TRIPS, waiver, nobody is safe until everybody is safe. Europe has to change its attitude. The Taoiseach mentioned talking to his European counterparts. We have to push that to make sure other jurisdictions have the kind of cover they need. We will all have different variants if that is not done.

See this speech in context