Regina Doherty (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Senator Gallagher will have to forgive me. I did not get to his contribution and I apologise. There is absolutely a need for co-operation between North and South. The Irish people are exasperated, listening to us calling for politicians, North and South, to co-operate and yet it does not happen. We put blocks and obstacles in our way and while they might be political, the people do not care. They just want us to get on and do it. I will contact the Minister for Justice today. I know she is in contact with her counterpart in the North. We need to see action as opposed to more talk.

I might ask Mr. Paul Reid to come back to us about the reasons that people do not attend for tests. If it is a transport or childcare issue, then those issues need to be addressed, but it may be, as it was last year with people not showing up for their second PCR test, because they think they are grand. The most shocking tweets I have read were from Dr. Tony Holohan recently. He talked about how we have had more cases in January than we had in the entirety of 2020. More than 1,000 of our citizens, people's loved ones, have passed away completely needlessly, yet we still do not seem to be getting the message through. We will try to find out the reasons and come back to that.

I apologise to Senator Bacik and will ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Coveney. I am sure he will make a statement and I will send it to the Senator once I receive it. If not, he certainly needs to make that statement. Democracy is precious and we take a lot for granted but it is certainly not taken for granted in countries where it is under threat. I will come back to the Senator about it.

She also asked for a debate on zero Covid. I will request it. The difficulty with calling it that is that "zero Covid" means different things to different people. We should certainly pursue an aggressive strategy to rid our country of the virus and we could certainly all get behind that.