Deputy Mary Lou McDonald - speech from 5 Mar 2020

Mary-Lou MacDonald Well, Count Corlea, I think we need to be careful in the mechanism that we choose for the purposes that the deputies have set out. I share the view of the committee that those at the front line of this emergency, all of their time, attention and resources need to be spent on keeping the community and the public safe. That said, we have a caretaker government and it is absolutely essential that those of us on the other benches aren't left as an afterthought when policy decisions are being made. Certainly, for our part, we want the absolute assurance that everything that needs to be done is being done to ensure capacity, including in terms of intensive care and indeed in the containment phase, isolation units, in terms of discharging well people from hospital, that we look at the home health, the gross shortfall in home health hours. In other words, we want to have access to information. We also want to influence in an appropriate and entirely constitutional way the very big decisions that will be made on this matter. I'm not convinced that an Oireachtas committee is the best vehicle for that, but I also know that what we currently have is absolutely deficient, where we're hearing after matters appear in the media about matters of the most grave and serious public importance. So that needs to be fixed. I think we can find a mechanism other than a formal committee to do that, but it needs to be done speedily. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Kareem Kaurla. Thank you very much. thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I morning related to a meeting. I'm standing to ask for a minute to answer that. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.