Garret Ahearn (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is entertaining in some ways, but also staggering, the amount of time that Senator Keogan flip flops on issues. She moves from being for something to being against it and uses the kind of language that is wholly inappropriate. She spoke about "butchering jobs" as if the Government or the Minister of State set out to butcher jobs in the aviation industry. She is now saying that aviation should be up and running again but six weeks ago, on 1 May, the same Senator, in this Chamber, said the following:

I find it staggering that the Government has radically curtailed the rights and freedoms of citizens with Garda-enforced 5 km and, at times, 2 km travel limits, yet international travel has continued without any meaningful restriction. How is this fair? How does this make sense? Surely, the Government should be introducing a mandatory quarantine on all non-essential travel into the country. Surely, this makes more sense than a somewhat arbitrary list of countries, mostly located in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, to be covered by mandatory quarantine.

She also said that 90% of the cases that have been detected in this country are of the British variant but that Britain was "conspicuous in its absence" from the list of countries covered by mandatory quarantine. Six weeks ago she wanted Britain to be restricted through mandatory quarantine-----