Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is nice to see the Minister again. It feels a little like Groundhog Day, to be fair. I will start by stating something that should be obvious to us all but perhaps it needs to be said anyway, that is, the vaccine programme is absolutely essential and everybody should get vaccinated. I was fortunate enough to get my third vaccine on Monday and I am delighted to have had it. I encourage everybody to do the same. There should be no ambiguity about that. We need to follow science.

My party fully supports public health measures and their provision, and we will not oppose them. However, we are not comfortable with this Bill. I know the views of my colleagues in the Dáil on this issue have had a good airing. We want to work with the Minister, as he saw around the hotel quarantine legislation that we supported last week. There was adequate debate about, and oversight of, that Bill. We tabled a number of very reasonable amendments in the Dáil designed to ensure oversight. The aim was to ensure that as regulations come in, we, in both Houses, get some say over them. We recognised, in our amendments, that it may not be possible to apply that oversight before the regulations come in. Trying to be reasonable, we suggested we could look at them afterwards. We want some degree of oversight of these regulations because it is important. As everybody has said, these are extreme emergency powers. Our argument with the Minister does not relate to the public health measures. Our argument relates to the lack of oversight. We were disappointed when the Minister did not take on board any amendments on Committee Stage in the Dáil. For that reason, we will be opposing the Bill. We will also give the Minister an opportunity on Committee Stage in the Seanad to revisit our amendments and perhaps with a bit more thought, he might adopt one or two of them. As I said, we want to work with the Minister. We want to ensure we have oversight.

There is a fair degree of frustration, as the Minister would acknowledge, over the lack of consultation at times about key measures. Mistakes have been made on a number of occasions. I do want to revisit all of them here today but I will revisit some of them. The lack of communication about schools is the most recent mistake. There was an appalling lack of consultation with stakeholders. The Government gave itself a week to decide but initially gave schools only 16 hours to be ready, which caused panic and resentment. I can also reference previous regulations that we did not support, such as the €9 meal and the recording of what people ate. There have also been impractical, complicated and unworkable rules for businesses. There was also the mess over Merriongate. We need to have some say because the fact of the matter is that all of us, regardless of what party we are from or if we are Independents, are held responsible for the regulations the Minister brings in. We should have some degree of oversight of them. I do not think that is an unreasonable request.

I will revisit the issue of schools, in particular. I have three teenagers who are in school today, wearing scarves, hats, gloves and coats. Like most people, I am at a loss as to why measures for schools were not taken during the summer, in particular the provision of filtration systems and HEPA filters. There has been mixed messaging. The Government kept repeating that schools were safe. We know that one in five positive cases of Covid in the past week has been a child of primary school age. Kids and staff are left freezing in schools, relying on open windows and sharing CO2 monitors between classrooms for ventilation and there still has been no movement on the issue of HEPA filtration. We do not have a clear picture of the extent of Covid in our schools because the Government removed testing and tracing, with the replacement antigen testing regime passing the buck onto parents and principals to identify their own contacts and test their own children. We need the return of contact tracing to schools. That would be a positive development. In the first 36 hours antigen testing was available for pod contacts in schools, 10,000 tests were ordered. We cannot pretend there is no Covid in our schools. Principals should not have to do the HSE's contact tracing job for them. They have enough on their plates. We need to bring back school-specific contact tracing teams.

It will not surprise the Minister when I again raise the issue of the Government's blockage of the intellectual property, IP, waiver so that developing countries can generate their own generic versions of these drugs. I support Senator Buttimer, who said the Government needs to do much more for the developing world. I hope he was referring to the Government changing its stance on the waiver of IP for vaccines. The Tánaiste made a statement in this Chamber earlier this week that was absolutely false and mistaken. He said that if we dropped the IP waiver, it would still take two to three years for these countries to be able to produce their own vaccines. I want to put on the record of the House that experienced manufacturers that are willing to make hundreds of millions of doses have come forward from all over the world, including Bangladesh, Pakistan, Senegal, Denmark and Canada. Biolyse Pharma in Canada has approached Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca and has stated it could be producing vaccines within six months. Incepta Pharmaceuticals in Bangladesh estimates it can make between 600 million and 1 billion doses. Teva Pharmaceuticals in Israel and Bavarian Nordic in Denmark have also asked to assist in the manufacture of vaccines but the IP rights are preventing them from doing so. The Government is continuing to support that stance.

The Director General of the World Trade Organization has reported that the Governments of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, South Africa and Senegal have all said they have facilities that could be retooled to produce coronavirus vaccines. UNICEF data suggests that when counting only those manufacturers already involved in some way in Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing, only half of them are working to produce the approved vaccines. This suggests plenty of capacity that could be repurposed. I need to put that on the record of the House so that we can be clear on this issue. The EU, including Ireland, is blocking moves to temporarily drop IP rights to enable the world to develop those vaccines so that we can really mean it when we say no one is safe until everybody is safe. It is an appalling stance for the Government to take. It is not good enough for the Minister to say he is personally in favour. It is certainly not good enough for the Tánaiste to say he has an open mind on the issue. I do not have an open mind on the issue. I am absolutely clear that the western world, Europe, and our Government, in particular, need to do more. There should be a public call for the waiving of IP rights so that we can finally allow the world to get vaccinated and move away from the appalling rate of vaccination of African people, which currently stands at 4%. It is not good enough.To be frank we need to see much more from the Minister and the Government in relation to that.