Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I wish to make a few brief points on this amendment and on the Bill before us. I accept that the Minister is in a difficult position. I also accept that we need legislation, and I fully support the provisions set out in section 4. The Health (Amendment) (No. 2) Act expires on 9 January and there will not be ample opportunity between now and then to debate it and I believe an extension of it is warranted. However, to be honest with the Minister, as someone who has reluctantly supported the provisions in this series of legislative measures, as the one that proposed the sunset clauses for the original legislation, I cannot see the justification for extending it beyond 9 February up to 31 March. There is an onus on the Government to come in here in January – if that means coming back a week earlier, so be it – carry out an evaluation of the situation when we have a better idea of the current variants and the progression of the virus over the Christmas period and provide justification at that point.

When the Minister came into the House on Friday and made the justification for the extensions that he is proposing, he stated that the virus is at quite a high level, not just here in Ireland but right across Europe, and that this is due to a combination of increased socialising. The decision was taken by the Government to increase the socialising, especially in nightclubs, without the use of antigen testing, which many of us in the Opposition had been pleading with him to introduce for ages. I accept that there is a debate between the academics as to whether we should have antigen testing. I also accept that the Minister sought separate specialist advice from the chief scientific officer in respect of that matter. He is to be commended on that, but ultimately, the call must be made by the Government and not by the public health advisers. The Government makes decisions. Public health advisers provide advice, but it is the Government that makes the final decision. We should have been rolling out antigen testing far more liberally at an earlier stage. It is only when the PCR testing has come under undue pressure and been unable to manage the scale of pressure that the public health officials decided to advise on antigen testing in limited cases. We need to have a proper and thorough debate on how we are going to live with Covid-19 because it is going to be with us in one form or another for a considerable period. We also need to have a far broader debate than the one we are having. That is not a debate for today, but it should happen early in the new year.

I want to pick up on the issue of the unvaccinated. There are myriad reasons why people are unvaccinated. There has been much commentary on unvaccinated people. The impression is given that people across the board are doing this out of choice, which is not the case. There are people who, for valid medical reasons, cannot or should not have the vaccine. The National Health Service website states that the possible reasons one would have a medical exemption from the vaccine include:

- people receiving end of life care where vaccination is not in the person’s best interests

- people with learning disabilities or autistic individuals, or people with a combination of impairments where vaccination cannot be provided through reasonable adjustments

- a person with severe allergies to all currently available vaccines

- those who have had an adverse reaction to the first dose (for example, myocarditis).

There are people who, for very legitimate reasons, cannot get vaccinated and they are not being accommodated in the provisions in this legislation or the other legislation. Antigen testing does facilitate those people engaging with society rather than having to continue to cocoon, which they have been doing up to now.

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