Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I want to add a few words to those which have already been spoken from these benches. When the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Coveney, then Tánaiste, came to the Seanad to announce the provision of the health Act earlier this year, I supported him and said that I was strongly behind him because I saw what I believed to be the alternative - the military trucks in Bergamo ferrying bodies away from hospitals in huge numbers, mass graves being dug in New York, and scenes from the around the world - if there was no adequate response from the State's health service and law-making services to the problems which were confronting us in Covid. I believed in my heart that the truth of the situation lay in what was recently stated by Dr. David Nabarro of the World Health Organization, that to contain a really serious emergency situation it was legitimate to have extensive clampdowns on people's economic, social, employment and other activities to avert a similar disaster. However, Dr. Nabarro also said and the World Health Organization not merely said but appealed to all governments in the world not to use clampdowns or lockdowns as the primary response to the Covid virus in our midst. I believe that the three Ws are hugely important - wash your hands, wear a mask and watch your distance - and a growing number of people are quite happy to adopt those measures and values in their own lives. However, we also agree in our hearts with what Dr. Nabarro said, which is that the use of a lockdown is simply to buy time so that the necessary resources and organisational measures can be taken in the health system to confront the problem and to minimise it.

Dr. Nabarro also said that the damage done by lockdowns is very substantial - people dying from non-Covid conditions, people failing to diagnose non-Covid conditions, people failing to avail of preventative measures in respect of other serious illness, depression, suicides, and damage to people who are confined to their homes with violent and disruptive members of households, be they abusers or people who are suffering from disability or whatever. There are many hundreds of people for whom a lockdown is a very serious personal challenge to their psychological, not to mention their economic, well-being. Economic well-being and psychological well-being are two not utterly different things.Someone may be near the breadline and dependent on a job in the entertainment business, for example. He or she may live in shared accommodation, as many people do. When such a person is told there is no reason to go to work and there is little or no money because he or she might not qualify this way or that for State support, and when he or she is told to stay at home and that home involves sharing a bunk bed in an overcrowded, multiple-occupancy house, there are very serious consequences to measures of this kind. We do not all live in the kinds of home that I or most people in the House have, that is, our own home where we are the master or mistress of our own activities. It is quite different for many people.

There cannot be any sense in continuously repeating the same mistakes. The HSE was given an opportunity to put in place in Nightingale hospitals and it did not do so. It was also given an opportunity to put in place a proper test and trace regime and it simply did not do so. I do not want to berate public servants, but some agencies are good at implementing policy decisions and some are poor. I recall a prominent civil servant who became frustrated with the slowness of the reaction of his Department. He used to say that if a job was worth doing, it was worth doing badly, and that if it could be got over the line, they could clear up the blood. There has to be a can-do attitude from now on. These six weeks that we now have must be used to do something about NPHET and about the imbalance between it and the tiny group of people who exercise control over it, namely, Ministers and their special advisers. These six weeks must be used to put in place a voice for enterprise and those whose businesses have been closed, and to introduce an entirely new regime of transparency in order that everything NPHET says behind closed doors to Ministers will be said in public to the people in order that we can evaluate what is appropriate.

There will be no point in opposing the motion because it will go through. Nevertheless, we cannot do it again. It is up to the Government to show that it really is a government and not a caretaker group, to avail of the six weeks of hardship it is imposing on the country, and to do its job and make a difference.