Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for going over time. I want to share my colleagues’ support for the vaccine programme. The credit for the vaccine programme goes to the thousands and thousands of women and men all over our country, in every one of our counties and every constituency, who have gone in, seven days a week, and worked very long shifts. In record time, they have put together a national vaccination programme, built an entire IT infrastructure and dealt with some very difficult logistics in terms of the temperatures these things have to be stored at.

As to our target, people talk about where we will get to by the end of June, July or August. The Government’s target, the bit that we could control, was getting the vaccines into people's arms as soon as they arrived in. We are data-bereft over the last week because of this heinous attack on the HSE’s IT systems but the last data I had showed that in excess of 96% of vaccines were getting out within seven days of them arriving here. Because of that, we can all feel it as we are talking to people, and I registered for my own vaccine over the weekend. I want to thank colleagues. The real credit for that is due to the people who have done enormous work over the last few months to get this programme up and running and to make sure we got this vaccine out and into people's arms as quickly as possible. It really is thanks to our incredible healthcare workers, the help of the Defence Forces and many other partners right across the system, including general practice, volunteers and people coming back from retirement. It really has been an amazing thing to be part of, seeing Ireland in all its facets come together to achieve this very important thing.