Ivana Bacik (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I was not going to come back in but I take issue with colleagues in government who have suggested our Labour Party amendment is a sledgehammer to crack a nut.Covid-19 is very far from being the latter. It was unfortunate language and I am sure it was not intended. Unfortunately, this is an emergency and we are all well aware of it. We all know how many people have died so tragically after being infected and how many lost their livelihoods or had businesses disrupted or shutdown for good. There has been a major imposition on children, people with disabilities and all of us in society. This is a case that clearly calls for the sort of emergency measures we would never contemplate in any other context. I am urging colleagues to support the amendment because it goes further. The Minister knows we support the Bill but we want it to go further.

By going further, extending the powers for mandatory hotel quarantine and ensuring that the laws banning non-essential inward and outward travel are enforced, as well as enforceable, this will help to engender and create an even stronger sense of public goodwill and solidarity, which we saw so strongly during the first lockdown but which has clearly been eroded by the reports about people engaging in non-essential travel. There is no question about that. It is eroding public compliance and goodwill and creating a great deal of discontent and disquiet, as well as being scientifically proven to have helped cause greater levels of transmission.

I remind colleagues of the study by Professor Paddy Mallon and colleagues which made it clear that the types of virus circulating in the first wave disappeared through the first effective lockdown last year but that the second wave was dominated by new variants from overseas, with the most devastating third wave spread by inward travel and social mixing over Christmas. The latter spread new variants far more widely. I make no apology for having changed views. All of us have changed views as we have gone through the past year, seeing the awful ways in which the virus has changed with dangerous new variants emerging. It is absolutely right for us to then change policy accordingly. Where the Government is to be criticised is for not changing sufficiently to take account of the new variants and not changing to ensure that we see greater consistency in a more effective approach taken in line with scientific evidence.

We all hope very much that the strategy for living with Covid works. My party and I strongly support the accelerated vaccination programme. We will do all we can to assist it and be constructive. Nonetheless, we are all very anxious about inward and outward travel and the evidence which demonstrates that the spread of the virus is accelerated when we do not impose controls on non-essential travel into and out of Ireland. That is the crucial point we make with the amendment. We are not proposing a ban on travel, we are simply proposing a way of making it more inconvenient for people to engage in the sort of non-essential travel we have seen too much of in recent months. In this way, we can help in a package of measures to suppress the virus and address the onward transmission issues.

To those who say travel only accounts for a tiny proportion of cases, the evidence is again clear that a small number of cases can be traced to inward travel but that travel reseeds and helps to spread new and far more easily transmissible variants. We need to invest far more in public health and our capacity to track back so we know the source and can control outbreaks where they occur. We are all rooting for strategies to address Covid-19 to work and we all want to see suppression of Covid-19. We differ in the approach to be taken and my party seeks an aggressive suppression strategy. Our amendment is in line with that.