Eugene Murphy (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will adhere to that request. I wish the Minister, Deputy Calleary, and the Ministers of State, Deputies Fleming and Jack Chambers, the best of luck. I am sure none of my party colleagues would have liked to get the appointments in the way they did.

To the Cowen family, I say that we all feel a certain sympathy for them. There is not a person in this House who does not feel sympathy for them, given the way this occurred. To Barry's wife and children, who have suffered enormous hurt, and I ask people to reflect on that, I want to assure them he is a good husband, a good dad and a good parliamentarian, and he will have a huge contribution to make to the Dáil and to Ireland in the years to come.

On the pubs issue, I suggest to the Leader that she would bring back to the Minister the point that if we have no more deaths from Covid in the next two weeks and the numbers of infections are kept low, at that stage, we might have a look at the situation of rural pubs. We are talking about fewer than 2,000 small ventures, many of them in rural Ireland. A number of those pubs, unfortunately, are not going to open because it will not be worth their while and they were having difficulty before this. There are also a number of publicans, some of whom I have spoken to in my region, whose capacity would be 70, 80 or 90 people but, because of the restrictions, that will be down to 15 or 20. They are not prepared to stand in a door and let 15 of their customers in and turn away ten and, therefore, they will not open until this is completely over. However, there are others who really want to open. While we have to stick to the guidelines and be very careful about this pandemic, and we cannot take any chances, if we were to look at this in two weeks and if the figures were favourable, we might end up in a situation where some of those smaller rural pubs could open before mid-August.