Senator John McGahon - speech from 24 Nov 2020

Leader, today essentially what I'd like to discuss is the concept of the vaccine strategy and the rollout behind that and we've seen really good news in recent weeks, wonderful news every Monday for the last three consecutive Mondays about the strength of the vaccines. We saw the Taoiseach yesterday say that he wants to present to government on December the 11th what our rollout strategy is and I'd like today to say that perhaps we should consider getting the minister into this house before Christmas to provide statements on what the rollout strategy would be and that would be my request today. I think that would be a very good idea. A couple of things about the rollout strategy that I think we really need to consider or that should be clearly outlined is what is the tiered system? So is it going to be healthcare workers first? Is it going to be elderly people second? How are we going to do it? The other thing is that what are we going to actually do to encourage mass cooperation with it? What are the time scales that we want to, what are the targets and the time scales? Do we want to have X amount of the population vaccinated by Y date for example? To have it really clearly lined out. And I actually think the benefit of that would be is that as we are now coming out of the concept of our second lockdown, we're facing into, you know, an uncertain Christmas, an uncertain January, as Senator Keoghan rightly said, you know, my view at RTE, the six o'clock news, you know, for the last couple of months, they're like the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, you know, for want of a better word. I really do believe that. And I think if the government can produce a really clear vaccine strategy before Christmas with a lot of detail, that that will provide a huge level of reassurance to the Irish public to actually say to the Irish public, you know, we've done fantastic over 2020. The light is at the end of the tunnel and here's the plan for us to get out of it. And if we could publish that in as much detail as possible for Christmas, I think that would provide a great level of reassurance to the Irish public. Thank you. Thank you.