The measure of a country is how it values its vulnerable. This can be ascertained by how we treat the people who look after the most vulnerable. Older people in nursing homes have been treated abysmally during the lockdown. They have been treated as an afterthought. When decisions were made, they had disastrous consequences for them. As a result, Ireland has one of the highest rates of nursing home deaths in the world. Despite this, there has absolutely no commitment to a full public investigation from this new Government. Pubs and restaurants are open for business but community facilities for people with disabilities are not open. As a result of the lack of direction on social distancing, many people with disabilities who have been at home since March are unlikely to be able to use services until the end of August at the earliest.

The childcare sector, which is charged with the development and care of the next generation of Irish people, is in chaos. This sector has been under phenomenal pressure in recent years, with tens of thousands of people having to take to the streets. Shockingly, I have received information from the sector which indicates that 180 providers have closed their doors since the start of the pandemic. As many as 10% of childcare providers have shut down due to the lack of support. These closures are accelerating. In the past week alone it has been reported that 55 childcare providers have closed.

My office spoke to two providers on the telephone yesterday and in the time between those two calls, another three providers had closed. I was told this morning that seven childcare providers in Dublin have closed in the past 24 hours.

The childcare sector is dying on its feet, yet the Government is sitting on its hands. I have spoken to representatives of the Federation of Early Childhood Providers and they are not just charging the Department of Children and Youth Affairs with wilful neglect of the sector; they are accusing it of gross mistreatment of childcare providers. The federation informed me that it has set up a mental health team with two doctors to deal with the level of trauma and upset that has been caused to its members by the Department and the Minister. I am asking the Tánaiste to intervene urgently to ensure childcare services have the necessary supports, that we do not see further closures of these services in the coming weeks, and to make sure there is a service for parents in the second half of the year.

In regard to the Deputy's earlier remarks, we all need to be very careful and responsible in how we use international comparative data relating to Covid. We all need to take the information we see on websites like Worldometer for what it is, which is not a like-for-like comparison between countries. Every country is at a different stage in this pandemic. Things look very different in Israel and Portugal today from how they looked a few months ago, and the same applies in other parts of the world. Countries that thought they had eliminated the virus, such as New Zealand, are now seeing new cases every single day. Different countries also count the numbers differently. One thing we always did in Ireland, from day one, was to count cases in care homes. Other countries did not do that. We counted suspected cases where there was not a laboratory test confirming the patient had Covid. Other countries did not do that. We did not discount people who had underlying conditions, as other countries did. If somebody with stage 4 cancer in a nursing home was suspected of having Covid but did not test positive for it, we included him or her in the total. Other countries did not include such cases. We need to be responsible in the way we use language and these types of data. It is not responsible to misuse data.

On the issue of childcare, we are all aware that childcare facilities often close in the summer period of July and August and things are different from how they are in September and October. We want to make sure the sector is fully up and running for September and October in order to meet demand. Data are being collected on reopenings and that information will be available for the period from Tuesday, 7 July, with a weekly update until early September. In a normal year, approximately 40% of childcare providers close over the summer. A total of 60% of the existing services have indicated that they will be reopening by September, and this portion may rise. The Government has provided a reopening package of €75 million, which is being made available through the Department of Children and Youth Affairs, and other Government supports for the sector are running through June, July and August. Since reopening, 1,000 services have registered 11,876 children on the Department-funded programmes, and registrations remain open until the end of the programme year. There have been 717 applications for a reopening support payment, with an approximate value of €3 million. In addition, there have been applications for capital grants totalling €7 million.

The number of Covid deaths in nursing homes in this country is absolutely shocking and it is wrong. I am always amazed that when a Government is confronted with these figures, the answer is that it counts those deaths better than any other country is counting them. How the deaths are counted is not something to be proud of. Preventing them is the important issue.

Regarding childcare services, the closures in the sector are complete, full-time closures. The grants that have been provided add up to about €2,500 for reopening, but childcare providers are dealing with overheads like electricity, insurance, rents and wages. They have fewer children coming in for fewer hours. Most of the sole traders operating in the sector are working 70 hours per week under an avalanche of administration and are getting no income at all. Their debts are building up at a rate never seen before and no level of future trading will get them out of that debt. This is a crisis unlike what we have seen any other summer and it needs a different response. The previous Minister for Children and Youth Affairs stated that €750 million would be given to the sector but that money has not materialised. Key stakeholders have been locked out of decision making by the Departments. There needs to be a proper injection of support and a lifeline given to the childcare sector in order to protect it.

I was involved in the country's response to Covid from day 1. I was at all the meetings where the big decisions were made and I can assure everyone in this House that our overriding concern always was to reduce the number of people who got infected and to minimise the number of deaths in all settings, whether in the community, in care homes or in hospitals. We know now from the data on excess deaths provided by the Health Information and Quality Authority, HIQA, that we overestimated significantly the number of excess deaths in Ireland. The reason we counted the way we did was that we thought it the right thing to do in terms of saving lives to overcount, because we could then contact-trace suspected cases, not just confirmed cases, which other countries did not do. The excess death figures produced by HIQA tell us a lot, including that we may be one of the few countries significantly revising down the number of deaths during the pandemic period. For some people, they saw the crisis as some sort of competition as to where they were in a league table. There was really hateful and nasty stuff from people who thought it was a sort of competition between countries. When they saw Ireland high up on a league table, they almost took a perverse pleasure in it because it was an opportunity to have a go at the Government, Dr. Holohan or whomever. I deplore that kind of attitude and those kinds of people, I must say, because they did nothing at all to help us when it came to fighting Covid.