Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I want to speak on amendment No. 20, which is in this group. The Minister is not making it easy for us to support the legislation. We have already stated that we will support it, as we supported the previous legislation last month, but the Minister does not make it easy because he does not meet people halfway at all. This legislation grants wide-ranging powers to Government to introduce emergency measures and to do that by regulation. Each time we have debated emergency legislation, I have tabled amendments asking the Minister to provide notice to the Opposition when he passes regulations. I have not asked for a vote of the Dáil on that but I have asked the Minister, in order to improve communication and in order that everybody is aware of what is happening, to provide 48 hours of notice to Members of this House and to the public, and to lay the regulations before the Houses before they are implemented. That is a reasonable proposal and it is regrettable that the Minster did not meet us halfway in that regard. I also asked on a number of occasions that we would review the impact of the legislation prior to any rollover of it. Again, that is good practice and we have seen what happened in recent times when that legislation applied. We could see what the pros and cons of it were, if there were issues or difficulties, how many times enforcement actions were taken, what needs to change and if lessons are to be learned. That is good practice and it was a reasonable request but the Minister did not accede to that. That makes it difficult to work with the Minister.

Overall, in the past year the Minister has been remiss in providing provide adequate information by way of briefings to the Opposition. He should have done that and we should have all been working on this together and trying to achieve the best possible outcome. This legislation and the Government approach are all the weaker as a result of the failure to work with other people and listen to what other people are suggesting. The Minister has refused to listen to anyone else, certainly not to people on this side of the House. Even outside the House, he has refused to listen to anybody beyond NPHET. The latter is a good public health body and it has done a lot of good work in the past but it has not gotten everything right and there needs to be an acknowledgement of that. There are two standout areas; the first is ventilation and the second is antigen tests. The reason a subgroup of NPHET was set up at the end of last year is that the expertise on ventilation did not exist within NPHET. That expert group provided advice on ventilation in January and it provided a second report in March. The Minister chose to ignore those two reports. That is infuriating for people who are asking why the Minister is not listening to the science.

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