John Cummins (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, who is here in place of the Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke. These are very important regulations as continue to grapple with the pandemic, though the severity of it is less. It is an important and prudent move by Government to ensure we can continue to provide testing and vaccination centres to the public. As the Minister of State rightly indicated, they should not be far away from people's localities and homes. The Covid legislation lapses at the end of the month and it is important we are able to continue to provide those facilities.

I note the limited scope of the regulations and the fact that the period involved is only 12 months. Throughout the pandemic, there were broader regulations in place that allowed the HSE to provide additional facilities, especially in acute hospital settings, to alleviate overcrowding, the constraints on outpatient departments and so on. To be frank, I found them to be positive regulations. When you see developments on hospital grounds they are in the main not that contentious because everybody sees the wider benefit of them to the entire public. While I welcome these regulations, I am a little disappointed that we did not continue some of the additional provisions for the likes of the acute hospital settings, in order to allow them be able to continue facilities. I am aware that might be a little controversial because people will say we are now through the majority of the pandemic and the proper process should be gone through to get planning approval. However, what I have found, especially in my own county and within University Hospital Waterford is some projects that perhaps would have been taking a significant period to deliver were delivered in a shorter period. Much of that owed to the fact things could progress faster without having to go through all the various planning process. In that context, there is probably something in there as we look forward from this point. I appreciate we must get these regulations in place with haste but there is probably something in the additional measures that allowed the likes of the HSE to be able to provide additional facilities over and above testing and vaccination centres with speed. I hope that is something Government can take on board in a wider context, so we can see a quicker provision of services and do not have unnecessary planning delays. Of course, we must build some kind of consultation into that process as well but there is a lot to be said for being able to provide facilities, especially health facilities, in a speedy fashion.