Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I will do so clearly. I do not believe in giving wide-ranging powers to the Minister without accountability to this House unless he can give us and the wider public an evidence-based argument that is convincing about what exactly the purpose of all of this is and how it is part of an integrated strategy to cope with Covid-19. That is distinctly lacking. What we end up with then is a Government essentially looking around to point the finger at other people and particular groups and incoherent messages about where the real problem is rather than take responsibility itself for the things it could and should do in order to cope with Covid-19. That is a political exercise rather than an exercise in trying to find the best way to cope with this extremely difficult situation.

That is the reason we will be opposing the Bill and why at the very least the amendment that Deputy Cullinane has put forward is a way of insisting there is some level of accountability and that the Minister does not get a blank cheque when he is not convincing people about where all this is going. In our view, he is failing spectacularly to take measures that it seems to us are a no-brainer in terms of developing our capacity to cope with this situation, whether it is air ventilation, having targets to get ICU up to the level it should be at, staffing resources for public health teams or maintaining on a permanent basis the health capacity, resources and infrastructure that we need to cope with Covid-19. On all of those fronts, we think the Government is failing, but it is quite quick to give itself power to take draconian measures that essentially point the finger at others rather than itself in terms of responsibility to do the things necessary to cope with the pandemic.

See this speech in context