Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank my colleagues for all their contributions. It is an important and healthy debate and long may we continue to have it. Nobody has all of the answers. The Government does not have all of the answers, nor is there a government anywhere in all of the world that does. It is essential we have a debate and that we listen to each other because we are ultimately trying to achieve the same thing. We want to keep people safe, out of hospital and alive and we want to try to open up normal life in our country as much as we can.

The toll on people, life, health, mental health, isolation and loneliness has been brutal, vicious and prolonged. People are at their wit's end and we all know it. We all know lots of people, including friends, family, constituents, neighbours and colleagues who have had enough and it is wearing people down. What I, the Government and all of us want is to find some way of suppressing this virus while allowing people to have some sort of a life. People are talking to me and saying they have not hugged their mums or dads in a year, they have not seen their grannies in a year and they have not seen their friends. It is brutal and the measures that are in place are taking a real toll.The great challenge we have, and every country has, is that the very things we all need to do, that is, meet people, meet up with friends, play a bit of sport, go and see a bit of live music, go to our friend's house, go to the pub or whatever, are exactly the things that this virus needs to replicate. It is harder now than ever for a few reasons. The first is that people are tired. Many people have been left in an awful state of mental health and isolation. Economically, people have lost their jobs and their businesses. It has been brutal. That is part of it. We are a year in now and we are facing this. The second reason is the variant, which now is well in excess of 90% of new cases. It is like dealing with a different disease. It is much more contagious and it turns out it is more severe. The data from the UK show it causes significantly more hospitalisation and death and it needs just the slightest opportunities to spread. That is what we are dealing with. We can all, hopefully, leave as much of our politics as we can outside the door because, ultimately, that is all this is about. That is all anybody is trying to do here. I thank the Senators for the debate and long may it continue.

Why should we go with the approach in this legislation? That is to say if, having looked at the evidence from around the world, the Chief Medical Officer tells the Minister for Health that he thinks I need to add the following 20 countries or 13 countries, I or whosoever is in this role as Minister for Health, takes that advice on and then can designate those countries quickly on the same day. Why do that rather than the alternative being proposed by some Senators and some other political parties, which is essentially just do it for the entire world? It is because behind that proposal is zero Covid. Senator Bacik has referenced it and referenced the independent scientific group, and zero Covid was referenced in the Dáil as well. For what it is worth, zero Covid is a very seductive idea. We can look at New Zealand and ask can we not just have that. We can ask whether we can not simply stop people coming into the country, after which we can all go about living our lives. We can ask whether we can not simply have what New Zealand has because, dear God, what we have now is very tough. That is part of the question. The answer that I have got from the Chief Medical Officer, from NPHET and from various experts - I accept there are highly credible people on both sides of this argument - is that it does not work in Ireland. New Zealand is an island 3,500 km into the Pacific Ocean that was not dealing with a more contagious variant, that got down to a very low level and was able to successfully implement it. Australia did something similar, although they had waves of it, with one of the waves coming from their hotel quarantine facilities. It is something we have to be cognisant of as we set it up.

I will make a few points on why we should not pursue zero Covid. Senator Bacik has repeatedly used the phrase "an aggressive suppression strategy". I would argue we have an aggressive suppression strategy but why not go zero Covid? In reality, if one lines up what we are now doing, including with this legislation, with the policy measures that are zero Covid, there is not much difference between them at this point. The main difference is time. For anyone who is advocating zero Covid at this point - people in my own party are advocating it as are many others, because everyone is sick of what is going on and asking could we not just do that and would that not be great - it would be great but here is what it would require. It would require keeping the level 5 measures in place now for months and months. I do not know how long, but September, October or November. It would require not opening the schools. It would probably require going back to a 2 km measure for our homes.It would require a great deal of enforcement. It would require that there be no construction, no education and no businesses. There would be none of the little bits that we have like the coffee shops where one can pick up a coffee on one's walks. There would be no sports, no arts - nothing. To begin zero Covid, we would require everybody except the most essential workers to go home for months and months and months and months. That is what would be required to get to the starting point of zero Covid.

I will compare that to what is going on in the country. We know from the data we have that people are finding it harder to comply. One of the most important measures we watch for whether we are staying on top of this is the number of close contacts. It went down to two in January and it is now 2.6. In the past five weeks, it went up by 0.1 a week. This week, it has gone up by 0.2 and the overall figure has therefore gone from two to 2.6. The R-nought number is now close to 1. It is still below 1, but it is much closer to it now. The mobility data are moving and everybody who is on the road knows this. We can see more traffic. It is also getting warm. It is March now and soon it will be April and May. It is not possible to get everybody to stay at home and to close the schools, colleges, businesses and everything else until perhaps July, August or September. Who knows how long it would take? I do not know. Nobody knows.

We must think about the severity of the measures we already have in place. Almost nothing is open. We all know from Professor Nolan’s work that the case numbers fell incredibly quickly but have plateaued. While we are seeing a massive reduction in the healthcare settings, we will see community infection beginning to rise.

I will set out my view. There is no question that zero Covid has worked for New Zealand. We would all prefer that level of disease prevalence in the country. Based on what is required to get there and on the current level of compliance with level 5, the public health advice is that it is just not possible, no matter how much people might want it, particularly with this B117 variant because it is so much more contagious.

What I said to my own political party when this was discussed at our parliamentary party meeting, and what I say to my colleagues here, is that the public health advice is that it is probably not possible. Anyone who would like to try to get there would have to stand over even harsher measures than those we have in place right now, potentially right through until the autumn. If that is what people are proposing, that is fair enough but that is what is required. In the Dáil, I heard certain members of the Opposition suggest that we could get there in four to six weeks. That is nonsense. There is not a chance that we could do so.

When we talk about zero Covid, we must talk about what it would actually require and whether the Irish nation or indeed any western European nation at this stage would be able to do that with the toll it would take. There would not be very much non-elective healthcare going on either.