Senator John McGahon - speech from 24 Sep 2020

Thank you very much. Minister, I'll be very brief because I just want to raise essentially one or two points. The first point is in relation to the Leaving Cert and how exceptionally well we did at it. When I was looking at kind of what some comments in the media were saying, what some opposition politicians were saying back in August, they were literally willing you to failure. They weren't even giving us a chance that the Leaving Cert would go well in the first instance. They were saying it was going to be exactly like the UK. They were saying it was going to be a mess. We absolutely sailed through it, Minister, thanks to you and your hard work, and I don't think proper credit was actually given to you with how well it ran. The second point I would like to raise, and I will be very brief with this last coherlock, but the second point is actually, I'm from Dundalk and I live 10 minutes from the Northern Irish border, and one of the problems we have here is, let's say if you have COVID in a school in the south, the HSE notify the school, and the school are then able to put in place the procedures that they need to do. The situation that I'm coming across, and I think this really is a situation whether you're in Derry and Bocraner, whether you're in Ocna Cloe and Monaghan, whether you're in Dundalk and Urie, where you have children who live in the north. For example, I know a family in Cross McGlen, but their children go to school in North Louth only 10 minutes away. The family in Cross McGlen had an elder sibling who goes to university in Northern Ireland and was tested there for COVID and was tested positive. So I would really like to know what the process is and what the procedures are for the NHS in Northern Ireland to alert family members who have schools here in Ireland and alert the HSE that a positive COVID case has taken place there, and that those individuals need to be notified properly and have the same procedures that we do here. Because essentially what is happening then is we're leaving it to the parents or the family to alert the school themselves in the south and to tell them how to do that. So if we could just tease out the procedure of what is there between north and south, that if you're living in the north, there is a positive COVID test case in your home, what is the procedure? And once that test is developed by the NHS in the north, what is the procedure of the NHS to let us here in the south know? So that's my very point very briefly. And what I would say last year before I finish, and as a new member of this house, I just find it so rude when people speak over five, six, seven, eight minutes and take time away from the rest of us towards the end of this debate. I really think if you can't, we're all professional politicians, if you can't speak sufficiently within the five minutes you're allocated, well, there's something seriously wrong. Thank you.