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

Often those decisions were finely balanced. The public health advice more often than not was for deeper, longer, stricter lockdowns. That was often the view of the Opposition, too, indeed some even flirted with the bizarre zero Covid policy which has proven to be among the worst options when we see the effects that occurred, or certainly not a sustainable option as it was abandoned by all the countries that attempted it.

In respect of Deputy Ó Murchú's questions about the terms of reference of the Covid inquiry, I am going to consult with Opposition leaders this week. I had hoped to do so in December but my diary just was not able to do it because of the amount of other obligations I have, particularly in relation to foreign travel. I hope that can go ahead this week. We will share the draft terms of reference with Opposition parties and discuss their views on the composition of them. Unfortunately I am not going to be in a position to engage personally with all of the different individual groups and stakeholders. We would never get this commission up and running. If it was possible to schedule that many meetings I would but I just cannot. We will find a mechanism to consult interested groups and stakeholders.

On health service capacity, I agree that our health service needs more capacity, not least because of our rising population, our aging population and the development of new treatments. What Deputy Boyd Barrett did not acknowledge is that this is exactly what this Government has been doing since 2020, in the three or four years since we have been in office. We have 20,000 more staff in our health service now than we had in 2020. Yes, there are people leaving but there are way more people joining, 20,000 more in fact. We have 1,000 more consultants than we had in 2020. We have 1,000 more hospital beds than we had in 2020. We have more ICU beds and the Deputy is right that we are going to need a lot more. In terms of nurses we are now in the top five in the western world when it comes to practising nurses per head, even higher when it is practising nurses per bed. For the first time that I can remember, in the most recent statistics we are now around average in terms of the number of doctors that we have. We had been below average previously. There have been pay increases and we are in negotiations with public service unions about further pay increases. We would have liked to have that agreed back in October or November but it has not been possible. I do think that the utopian system, or perhaps the ideal system, to be fair, that Deputy Boyd Barrett describes sounds very like the NHS. It might have been a model that would have worked 50 or 100 years ago but it does not work in the modern world. What do we see in the NHS? We see longer waiting lists and waiting times for patients, lower life expectancy, worse outcomes when it comes to stroke and heart attack and lower pay for the staff.

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