Carol Nolan urges mandatory quarantine, criticises tourist entries

Aumatagut, Cahirleach, Taha, Saream, Lorcher and Millish, Tanaiste, and you. Minister, I want to say from the outset that I was deeply sorry and shocked to hear about the threat to your family home. It's totally unacceptable, it's appalling, it must have generated unnecessary concern for you and your family and these actions should not happen and I wholeheartedly condemn them. This bill, as we know, proposes to introduce mandatory quarantine for travellers arriving into this state to limit the spread of COVID-19, particularly in light of recent variants of the disease which have been identified. It also increases various penalties for breaches of COVID-19 restrictions and I welcome that. But I'm just wondering, Minister, can we have a date for when this will come into effect, when it will be implemented? Because there are questions that the public has. The public has made great sacrifices, we all know that. People haven't seen their families in the last year in some cases and it is difficult and I think in order to give people hope, we must provide some dates in terms of implementation. This is an issue that has already, to some extent, been debated in this House, during the private member's motion from the Labour Party when it called for the introduction of mandatory hotel quarantine for all travellers arriving by sea and air into the state with the exception of designated essential and logistic workers with PCR testing at arrivals and the follow-up tests after five days. But the rural independent group have continuously raised this issue and spoken about the necessity for such a regime to be implemented as far back as last April, we were strongly calling for this measure. At the time, I wrote to both the Den Taoiseach and the Minister for Justice requesting that unnecessary preventative measures be put in place urgently to safeguard against the heightened risk of COVID-19 infections emerging from within the tourist population and it is difficult to understand or to grasp why hundreds of thousands of tourists entered this country when we had very strict restrictions imposed on our own citizens. It is hard to fathom why this was allowed to continue and it certainly was wrong and we have been very consistent in the ruling independent group in condemning that. At this stage, there was a lot of speculation as to the numbers arriving, but that is not the case now. We know that thousands of people have entered the state at all levels of the restrictions. We also know that this is the kind of action that has served to radically and fundamentally undermine public confidence in the overall capacity of the various COVID plans to actually reduce the case incident rate. They see news reports of another thousand or several thousand or tens of thousands travelling into the state and yet people are confined to a paltry five kilometres travel distance and that is just not acceptable. I know I have had many constituents in my rural constituency of Leish-Affley contacting me about this and asking for that to be extended because it just doesn't make sense to confine people to just five kilometres, particularly in rural areas. It makes no sense so I would ask you Minister to look at that. It is only natural that a certain level of resentment and anger is going to build up about the perceived unfairness. As I said last April and I say it here again today, we can allow exemptions for those involved with maintaining food security and supply or essential health services and I am happy to see that the bill before us provides for that. But as I welcome this bill Minister, it is very difficult to avoid a sense that we are closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. I would have preferred as the general public a more proactive approach instead of trying to catch up now. We had an opportunity to engage in genuine preventative measures last year with respect to our airports and inward travel, but we failed to adopt it because deference was given to the European travel area requirements. As I understand it, even last April, we already have in place a wide-ranging and enhanced customs infrastructure that was initially put in place to deal with post-Brexit customs checks at Roslare Europort. This has involved revenue appointing over 400 additional staff nationally to customs and related roles for Brexit, with 30 of these additional 400 staff assigned to Roslare Port. Surely some of those staff and some of the customs check infrastructure could have been repurposed to ensure that people entering the state through our ports or airports were here for reasons of absolute necessity and genuine reasons and not for non-essential reasons. We had tourists entering this country when our own people were confined and that does not make any sense and I hope we won't see that going forward. Perhaps if we were and if we had to take more proactive measures, we would not be in the position that we are here in today. I also note that the long title of the bill emphasises that the bill makes exceptional provision in the public interest to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and variants of it. It notes particularly that the emergence of variants of the disease, specifically the United Kingdom, Brazilian and South African variants, show evidence of increased transmissibility and the potential to evade immune response, posing a very serious risk to public health. The spread of such variants, it states, may pose a threat to the effectiveness of vaccines and affect the state's vaccination programme. I feel that going forward, Minister, we have to be serious about this mandatory quarantine. It can't be tokenistic. Every measure needs to be rolled out to make sure that we are preventing the spread. In terms of vaccine rollout, I do hope that our carers will be prioritised for the vaccine. I know there are some prioritisation of categories with underlying health issues, but I would hope that it would be rolled out to our carers.