Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

On 5 March 2020, the Ceann Comhairle called me to make my first contribution to the House. The previous weekend, a case of coronavirus had led to a closure of a school in my area. Local councillors and Deputies had been briefed in City Hall by people who we considered to be unknown public health officials but who the entire country would soon to get to see on a nightly basis. I left that meeting feeling incredibly afraid, not just for my community but for the country.

In a wave, Covid came upon us and our community and spread across the whole country. It changed everything for the two years that I have been a Member of this House. It has dominated every aspect of every day. It has taken twists and turns with its key characteristics being the ability to both surprise and mutate. As a population, we learned about R-numbers and social distancing. We watched as around the world countries and cities such as New York and Italy struggled with ventilator shortages. We learned of temporary army hospitals on battleships and body bags being piled up in corridors. We prayed that those things would not happen here.

Every person in this country, young and old, has borne the burden of Covid-19 but those on lower incomes, in poorer housing or in front-facing manual and service jobs have borne a heavier burden. Those in clinical settings with Covid-19 patients, many of whom died alone, bore the hardest burden of all. I pay tribute to all those people and all those who lost their lives.

In the past two years, I have voted for some extraordinary restrictions. These involved Government reaching into people’s lives, restricting their movements, employment and contact with family and friends. I want people outside the House to know that I took none of those votes lightly. I know Ministers in the previous and current Governments did not take any of them lightly either.

In an unprecedented pandemic, there were things that Ireland definitely got wrong. However, as I have said many times in this House, we crafted a path that was set neither by the zero-Covid zealots or the herd immunity champions. We never put the economy over public safety. We stepped in to help families and businesses financially in a much greater way and for much longer than many other countries did. By treading that middle ground, perhaps we doubled our critics, but this country has got through the last two years by balancing restrictions and freedoms. This was the right strategy, one which I believe it will be vindicated in the course of a full review. I look forward to such a review because I believe that we can learn many lessons. As a member of the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response, I echo the calls for an investigation into what happened in those early months in primary hospitals and nursing homes.

Ireland got many things right. That is why we had one of the lowest death rates in Europe. That is not a statistic but it is people's lives. It is why we had one of the most successful vaccine roll-outs. It is why independent analysis ranked us highly in how we balanced restrictions and freedoms. I saw both Opposition and Government Deputies call for this or that to open or close. I did it too. We all had good reasons for making those cases and we made them on behalf of good people. Government had the job of deciding on that balance. Decisions were required. While some in the House had the role of challenging those decisions, those of us on this side of the House had a role in making them. They were always made in the interests of the Irish people and in their interests alone.

As we emerge from Covid-19, we will have to learn lessons. For me, our reliance on key public services and their importance have been key learnings. Childcare, public health, drug support, education and caring professions all need resources. They need public funding and, importantly, public governance. On the return to work, Dublin is already seeing increased traffic and longer commuting times. Our city centre is seeing life again, but our urban villages are losing some of the life they gained. How do we retain the balance the Government had to strike at a national level? People saved hours of time commuting and gained those hours with their families. How do we challenge ourselves to ensure we maintain that balance? How can we set targets for those people who work for the Government to make sure more people are able to work from home?

By God, we have all missed travel but we discovered some new and old gems in Ireland. How do we ensure Irish tourism is the first choice for people travelling abroad? For international travel, with climate change being our next challenge, we have to ask whether we are really paying the full carbon cost of international travel and low-cost flights? There are so many things we could learn from Covid-19 but, as Deputy Creed said, the response to the Covid-19 challenge meant we learned how to say “Yes” to solutions and to supporting their implementation. That is the key lesson for me in how we learn from Covid and implement many of the solutions identified in the programme for Government.

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