Sharon Keogan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am sorry; I do not interrupt anybody. Senators can come in after me.

Consent, obviously, is the most important thing. I want to read out a tweet the WHO sent out this week:

As school holidays approach, we must also acknowledge that children contaminate their parents and grandparents at home, with a ten times increased risk for these adults to develop severe disease, be hospitalized or die when non-vaccinated.

A subsequent tweet from the WHO reads:

The use of masks and ventilation, and regular testing, should be a standard at all primary schools and vaccinating children should be discussed and considered nationally, as part of school protection measure.

We failed in ventilating our schools. Money was only allocated this week and schools now can apply for that. We failed when we took away community testing. We brought in sending antigen tests out to the schools at the end of November. For three months before that, however, we fiddled around doing nothing.

I will read another tweet from the WHO:

Finally, my third call: is not to mandate vaccination if you haven’t reached out first to the communities. Mandates around vaccination are an absolute last resort and only applicable when all other feasible options to improve vaccination uptake have been exhausted.

We are two years into Covid-19. People's choice around vaccination is their choice. It has got nothing to do with me or with the Minister of State. If someone decides not to have the vaccination, that is their choice and I respect that choice. People are now more aware of what they must do to keep themselves safe. We all know the mitigating measures and the lines of defence we need to take.

People might try to swing someone into a far right group just because that person stands up for those people who do not want to take the vaccine. I will stand up for those people in here. Whether I am vaccinated or not is absolutely nobody's business. I believe we all received an email today from a journalist. This journalist was seeking to find out whether I was vaccinated and if I was taking the booster. It is nobody's business. My medical history is my business. It is nobody's business. Those are the things I wanted to speak to the Minister of State about.

I am really not happy about what is happening in Austria, which is mandating every single citizen to be vaccinated and fining, interning and detaining them if they are not vaccinated. We do not want to go down that road. We should not even consider going down that road. We must be very careful, however. There are people out there who we have left behind, that is, those who are medically exempt. Before we leave these House on Friday evening or before the Minister of State leaves on Thursday evening, we must ensure that legislation is brought forward in order that those people who are medically exempt will be able to access a medical Covid certificate.