Richard Boyd Barrett: Urgent call to fund health workers and supports

With the Covid-19 virus, we're facing a truly unprecedented and quite honestly frightening public health emergency that threatens our society and that threatens the health and well-being of huge numbers of people and particularly our elderly and vulnerable citizens and we have to do absolutely everything and throw everything out of us. every single resource available to us at fighting the virus and protecting those who could fall, could suffer from its advance. Critical in that, as many have said, is that we have to support our health workers and the health service who are on the front line of fighting this and all those heroic people who are risking their own health to protect us and to protect those who may fall victim to it. I want to say particularly in that regard that the student nurses who are going to be asked to assist in this effort should be paid, they should be paid and not asked to do this work for nothing. I also want to pay tribute to other essential workers in retail, in other key public services who are going to help our society sustain itself through the trauma that we are facing and the crisis that we are facing over the coming weeks and months. It is critically important that in responding to this crisis that we are led by public health advice and by science and not by anybody playing politics with people's lives and with the crisis that faces us. We see the dangers of that happening in the north and in the UK where, quite frankly, politics has trumped science and public health considerations in a really quite shameful way with the behaviour of Boris Johnson and some of those in the northern political authorities. And it is critically important that we continue to put maximum pressure on the northern authorities to have an all Ireland consistent approach to addressing a crisis that affects all of this island and which, as we all know, knows no borders. But it is also critical that we protect and support the incomes of people who are going to be affected, as many tens of thousands already have and will be as this crisis unfolds and people lose their jobs, are forced to stay home, are forced to self-isolate. And we need to put the maximum resources into protecting our citizens who have already demonstrated an absolutely incredible willingness to be part of the collective effort of fighting this virus and adopting the protocols of social distancing, of avoiding unnecessary gatherings and interactions. And, of course, as has been said, but it needs to be repeated again and again, the absolute key to defeating this virus is what we do in the next few weeks in terms of practising those social distancing protocols and avoiding unnecessary interactions. The more people avoid interactions, the less possibility there is for the transmission of the virus and therefore the greater possibility that our health services will not be able to cope and not be overrun as the virus transmission surges. And one only has to look at, quite honestly, the frightening scenes in Italy at the moment to see what we could face if we don't get this right in the next few weeks. I do think, though, it is important to say that we have a responsibility as well as the collective effort of all of society and the willingness that people have already shown that we have to put every bit as much resources and energy into protecting our people and resourcing our health service as we showed willing to do to protect banks and bailout banks back in 2008. We need to show at least as much and indeed more willingness to provide those resources to our citizens, to our health workers and to our key frontline services in order to sustain us through this crisis. And that leads me into some of the amendments that we have proposed. First of all, I welcome the various payments and income supports that the government are proposing in this bill, but I do think they need to go further. And we've put amendments to that regard. The 305 payment should be available to everybody who is losing income or losing employment as a result of this crisis, not just to people who are diagnosed or who are advised to self-isolate. The truth is, the bar workers who are instructed to go home or the worker who decides it is not safe to go to work because they might act as an agent to transmit the virus is doing as much as anybody to prevent the transmission of the virus. They are all acting on public health advice and therefore they should all be treated equally in terms of the income support. So I do not see the case for two tiers of income support. The 305 payment should be available to everybody. And by the way, I think it is very important to say, given that some workers are still being forced to go into workplaces where they can't, into non-essential workplaces, where they cannot practice social distancing, that those workers should have the right to say, I'm not going to work. I'm going to stay at home and that they should have the income supports provided to them if they make that responsible decision to do that. The other series of amendments we put in is to say that if the people are being asked to make big sacrifices, then it is also important that industry and big business do the same. And we believe that all private healthcare capacity and all privately held industrial capacity are buildings that could assist in preventing the transmission, the spread or in helping and treating those who fall victim of this crisis. And I mean here that companies who produce medical equipment, which we produce large volumes of, ventilators, personal protective equipment, lab capacity, all of that should be put under the control of the public health authorities, under its direction and control. And there should be no question, obviously, of two tiers of healthcare in the face of this unprecedented health crisis. So we have a whole series of amendments on that regard. And I heard, Keone Corlea, for example, to give you the importance of this, Paul Reid from the HSE told us yesterday that personal protective masks, which our health workers needed, before this crisis cost 37 cents. On the open market, they're now charging 11 euro per mask. Now that sort of profiteering is not acceptable. So this, in this case, in this situation, more than ever, people must come before profit. And all of those capacities to produce that equipment, to do anything we need to respond to this crisis should be put under the control of the public health authorities. And there should be no question of anybody being allowed to profiteer from it. Finally, we need to make sure that people aren't suffering pressures of rent, mortgage repayments or utility bills. And we have amendments calling for an amnesty on all of those payments for the duration of the crisis. And very finally, I want to say this. We need to give the power to our public health system to respond to this crisis. And therefore, we absolutely support this legislation. But there are some very draconian powers in here. And we think there has to be checks on that. And that therefore, it shouldn't be the case that if these powers are extended after May the 9th, that they can be extended simply by laying an order before the Dáil. They must be voted on. The Oireachtas must vote on any decision to extend these draconian powers. And the question of the medical health officers who are going to exercise these powers need to be clearly defined as medical specialists. Any clarification? Any clarification?