Yesterday, I raised the requirement to have a Minister in charge of the roll-out of vaccinations for Covid-19. In fairness, the Taoiseach said he would consider the issue. I hope he does so by the end of this week. I fundamentally believe we need one. The volume of people who have been in contact with me agree. We must have a situation where somebody working in this eminent task force is not being second-guessed and that he or she does not have to go through the line Minister or line Department and worry about whether the decisions he or she is being asked to make are going to be questioned. Professor MacCraith is an excellent man and can chair the group, but there must be a Minister in charge. He does not have executive authority to make quick decisions. Decisions will save lives, businesses and jobs and will open our society. I accept we must do it properly, but we must do it with as much speed as possible.

Consider what is happening in Finland, France, Denmark and now the UK with regard to their plans for the roll-out. I am not saying our situation is always comparable, but equal haste and thought must be put into this. I am concerned that the task force has only met twice. I do not believe it should be just meeting like that - it should be permanent. We have seen Ministers continuously appearing for weeks, and the Taoiseach has joked about this in the past, with high-visibility jackets during emergencies, storms and so forth. This is the biggest emergency we have ever faced, or will face in our lifetimes. How the roll-out of the vaccine will be carried out requires a national standing group with a Minister in charge.

Dr. Noel Browne was the first Minister for Health in this country. He is a hero of mine and of the Labour Party. His sole role was to get rid of tuberculosis, TB. He helped to do that. The current Minister must do the same with Covid-19. The plan is due to be announced on 11 December and I do not expect the Taoiseach to have all the answers about what will be announced. However, I ask him to confirm that the following areas will be covered: the vaccines procurement process; storage; the order in which people will get it; the rules on how it will be administered; and the rules on how society will reopen. Various companies and organisations are advertising, for example, Longitude is now being advertised for next July for 120,000 people. If somebody arrives there without a vaccine, will the person be allowed to enter?

There is also the public health campaign. An issue that is important for me is the IT system that will deal with this. I come from an IT background. The only unique identification code for citizens in this country is the personal public service, PPS, number. We must have a database that can be interrogated with regard to who gets the vaccine, who does not get it, underlying illnesses, age and so forth. I presume the announcement on 11 December will outline what we are doing in all these categories.

I set up the task force. This is an issue of national priority that goes to the top of the Government and I will stay on top of this until everything is resolved. To be clear, much of the experience and expertise resides in the Department of Health and the HSE. They have been involved in a range of previous vaccination programmes with the national immunisation advisory committee and so forth. One must draw upon the large amount of residual expertise and experience there.

For the information of the House, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna sought market authorisation yesterday from the European Medicines Agency, EMA, and Ms Emer Cooke, an Irish person, briefed health Ministers this morning. The agency will assess the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine by 29 December at the latest, and perhaps before that. Notwithstanding what happened in the UK yesterday, the responsibility of that authority is huge in terms of recommending a vaccine as safe and effective. We should not create a pressure zone on the regulatory authority to do the right thing here. I say that generally. That is important.

The work of the task force is proceeding at pace. Yesterday saw the delivery of up to nine ultra-low temperature fridges to the country. The trucks are stored in Citywest. The Deputy is correct - we know what the essentials of this will be. Logistics is a key work stream that is being worked on. On the IT infrastructure, an entire database will have to be created with regard to who gets what. There is work on the workforce that administers the vaccine. Due to the scale of this, it will be more than the normal workforce that would administer the vaccine. There is also surveillance, monitoring and interpreting the data subsequently in terms of how it is working, the outcomes and so forth. There is the sequencing of who gets the vaccine first, in what order and how that happens. Of course, communications will be a vital strand. Then there is the overall governance and oversight of the operation.

With regard to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, the infrastructure is already coming into play with the ultra-low temperature storage fridges that have arrived into the country. They will be commissioned by the middle of next week. Then they have to be distributed within five days from the central depot when a vaccine ultimately arrives here. The view on Moderna is that the EMA is looking at early January for a meeting to assess its market authorisation application.

I appreciate the information the Taoiseach has provided to the House. This is not in any way about politics, and I mean that sincerely. My party believes we must up our game here. The Taoiseach will be aware of the adage, "Fail to prepare, prepare to fail", from his fellow Cork man. We cannot have that. We must get it right. I fully support the Taoiseach in this regard.

However, with regard to the information he provided to the House, I believe information will have to be provided continually and not just as a result of me asking a question on Leaders' Questions every week.

I honestly think a Minister should be in charge of this group. I urge the Taoiseach to do that, and not because it is coming from the Opposition. I will not be running around saying that he followed what I suggested. It does not matter. This is way too big for all that political rubbish. We need a standing group that will be able to communicate and deal with all of the issues. For instance, if private companies say they want to vaccinate all their staff, will they be allowed to do so? Can people buy the vaccination privately themselves? What about the interrogation of the infrastructure from an IT perspective? All of that needs to be put in place very quickly. We need somebody in charge who is going to make all those executive decisions. We do not need to have a situation where others who are working for the group and doing their best will be worried about it.

I thank the Deputy. His time is up. I call the Taoiseach.

We also do not need a situation where the communications on how we are going to implement all of this will be done once or twice a year in the Dáil.

That is the reason I established a task force.

The Taoiseach is going to be busy.

There has to be proper line accountability, right to the Minister for Health in the first instance in terms of supervision.

It is under the Department of the Taoiseach.

I set up the task force and it will report to me. It will report on 11 December. Generally speaking, I prefer to let it get the job done, get it sorted and dot the i's and cross the t's. The task force can present the plan and we will then operationalise it. The HSE will be a key driver of the operationalisation of it and the Department of Health will have oversight of that, as will the Minister for Health. As I have said, in terms of sequencing, there is a significant experienced team in the Department of Health that has overseen many immunisation programmes over the past decade or so.

They were of a different scale.

This is of a different scale. That is why we have brought in external expertise and those people are represented on the task force. It is important to draw on those strands that are then clearly accountable to a Minister. It is easy to nominate someone and put him or her in charge but he or she would not necessarily have the line accountability or authorisation over officials or agencies. That is an issue that will have to be sorted. I accept the Deputy's overall point. He is making a constructive contribution to the debate. All of us in the House-----

I thank the Taoiseach.

-----will have a significant role to play on the communications side to make sure that there is a good national collective take-up of the vaccine.

I thank the Taoiseach very much.