Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. I remember the pandemic very well. I remember it almost on a day-to-day basis and I remember the very difficult decisions and the different judgment calls that had to be made at different points in time, often without much information. At the very start we knew very little about the virus, as the Deputy will recall. It was not even clear at the start whether asymptomatic transmission was even possible. That became clearer later in the pandemic. It will always be the case that with hindsight things will look differently than at the time when we had so little information.

I remember something that Paul Reid, the head of the HSE at the time, said at the start of the pandemic. He said that there was no road map, no play book and no lived experience as to how one deals with a pandemic of this nature. He said we would probably get about 70% of things right and 30% of things wrong. That is probably correct, but it is important that we find out what we got right and what we got wrong. This is why there will be a public inquiry. A public inquiry will be established this year to examine how the pandemic was handled in Ireland, not just healthcare aspects such as what happened in hospitals and nursing homes, but also around testing, the public health advice that was given around masks and antigen tests and all those things that became controversial, and also the economic response. All of these things need to be inquired into. I am committed to having that inquiry up and running this year.

With regard to there being a lack of staff, there was a lack of staff at various points during the pandemic. It was often the case that staff were just unavailable. In some cases, staff are unwilling to go into nursing homes for fear of getting the virus themselves. I can understand that. In other cases, when people were contacted because they had offered their services, they were not available when they were contacted. That was the real experience I had during that period of time. The Deputy will also recall that during that time I re-registered as a doctor and took part in the vaccination programme and the occupational health programme prior to that.

The characterisation the Deputy mentioned at the start was not particularly accurate. I am sure it was the case that there were people who went into hospitals who were in very good health but perhaps had, for example, a broken leg and who contracted the virus and died from it. Unfortunately, this does happen in healthcare. It is never something that anybody wants to see happen but the vast majority of people who died from Covid in Ireland were people who were elderly or had an underlying medical condition. That is how viruses work. That would have been the case in the community as well as in hospitals and nursing homes. Out of respect to the relatives of the thousands of people who did die in hospitals and nursing homes we should not create the impression that all or most of those deaths were preventable. Some of them might have been, but nobody dies of natural causes. There is always a reason. Very often it is a respiratory infection or urinary tract infection. For people who are elderly or who have comorbidities that is the thing they get at the end and that is the cause of death. It is not the case that those deaths were all or even mostly preventable. Out of respect for those families, many of whom are still grieving, it is important that we do not create a false impression in that regard.

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