Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

With unaccompanied minors, there are two possibilities. The first is that they go into the care of Tusla. Tusla then carries that out and it is the correct agency to do that. Alternatively, if the minor has somewhere safe to go in Ireland, he or she can go to that place and be quarantined in that place.

I will finish by reiterating that nobody wants hotel quarantine. My understanding is there are very limited situations in which any of us can be deprived of our liberty, and rightly so. One is a custodial sentence, another is through mental incapacitation, and this is another. It is a very serious thing for us to do to anybody because nobody going into quarantine has done anything wrong. They are not guilty of anything. In terms of balancing human rights and civil liberties, it is about balancing the rights of these people coming in with the rights of everyone in the country to be protected against these variants of concern.

The figures are compelling. If we look at the number of variants of concern which have been detected, the figure we used was 59, if memory services correct. As of 27 May, there were 59 variant of concern cases. The figure is likely to be higher than that because the genome sequencing takes time and we are still getting results on that. If we call it 60, and we broadly assume a 90% reduction in both the number of cases that would be coming in and the number of variant of concern cases being imported, because those going into hotel quarantine have already gone through a lot, having got their preflight PCR tests and so forth, we would be looking at either having successfully stopped ever coming in or having identified and isolated perhaps 600 variant of concern Covid cases. That is a very large number of variant of concern cases. We are watching the Indian variant situation very carefully but potentially to have stopped or identified approximately 600 incoming variant of concern cases is a very significant positive in terms of our national response. On that basis, I believe the very significant imposition on innocent people that this quarantine system entails is proportionate and warranted.

I have laid out how we would envisage it working in the future. Essentially, it would be on a reduced basis because it would take account of the EU, the EEA and people being vaccinated, and it would look only at higher risk countries as designated by the European Union.