Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

The Minister talks about public health advice as if it is a uniform issue. He acts as if it is singular and there are no differences of opinion in public health advice, or that it is given down from on high. The truth of the matter is there are many different public health advices. Every single country in the EU has a chief medical officer who delivers public health advice and much of that advice differs vastly. It is even contradictory in some cases. This idea that there is infallibility among public health advice and therefore as elected representatives we have no other option but to kneel down in front of it and not challenge it is wrong.

The truth of the matter is that there are many different competing public health advices right around the European Union and they are having different results in those countries. In some European countries the public health advice was to increase hospital capacity at this time of need. Despite the Minister's utterances the dial on hospital capacity here has not moved significantly enough to deal with the crisis. Other public health advice in places like Denmark, for example, was to implement venue access antigen testing. There are no silver bullets in this fight but that is one of the most important tools we have and it has been opposed by the public health advice in this State for a long time. There is now some movement on it. The Government has introduced testing access for coming into Ireland but it has still not done it for venue access. Proper air ventilation is public health advice but that is not being followed. Contact tracing is public health advice in many countries and yet it is not happening here.

Let us get rid of the fallacy that there is a singular public health advice and that therefore nobody should question it. One thing we have learned in this country for generations, to our cost, is not to question people in authority. That has done enormous damage in many ways in this country in the past. The Minister himself, when he was an Opposition Deputy, questioned public health decisions. When the HSE intercepted - and I am using the Minister's word here - PPE, oxygen and staff that were destined for nursing homes, Deputy Donnelly disagreed with that public health decision. He was right to do so because that decision led to a weakness in the nursing home sector's ability to deal with the crisis that was happening there. Public health advice opposed closing nursing homes to visitors for a full month between 3 March 2020 and April 2020 and allowed people to circulate in those nursing homes seeding the illness. Public health advice moved 10,000 people from hospitals into nursing homes in the first six months of 2020 and did not PCR test all of them. The Minister should not use public health to try to dampen down dissent or challenge in this Chamber because it is the wrong thing to do.

NPHET has gotten decisions wrong. No organisation would get every decision right and I am not saying that is possible. In the teeth of a fast-moving Covid crisis it is natural for organisations to get things wrong but its latest predictions with regard to the level of hospital cases and ICU cases and so on have been widely off the mark. Even its most optimistic predictions have been widely off the mark.

To be honest, I think the Minister is being too hard on Sinn Féin. In fairness to Sinn Féin it has been on the same page as the Government for most of the last 18 months. It may have flip-flopped a little around Covid passes and so on by supporting them, being against them and supporting them again. I might buy Deputy Cullinane a cushion for Christmas because his rear end must be sore from the fences he has been sitting on over the last while.

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