The Government's failure to follow public health advice is responsible for Ireland having the worst rate of Covid infection in the world. It is responsible for hundreds of tragic deaths and these tragedies were avoidable.

On 26 November, NPHET wrote to the Government and stated, unambiguously, "NPHET therefore recommends that the hospitality sector remain closed ... over the eight-week period". The Government broke with that advice under the pressure of business lobbying and decided to open pubs and restaurants. At the time I said this was a recipe for seeding the virus across Dublin for a couple of weeks and then spreading it throughout the country. The Taoiseach ignored me and other socialist Deputies. Most important, he ignored the public health advice.

With cases then clearly out of control, Dr. Tony Holohan wrote to the Government on 21 December, calling for measures as set out in level 5, including the closure of retail. On 23 December, after a NPHET meeting, he wrote again, calling for the "full suite" of level 5 measures to be introduced. It was not until 31 December that retail was finally closed.

The question is whether the Government will learn any lessons from the disastrous and deadly mistakes it has made so far. Will it finally abandon its failed living with Covid strategy which has resulted in yo-yo lockdowns? Instead of delivering us a fourth and fifth lockdown before we have sufficiency vaccination, will the Government seek to ensure this is the final lockdown by implementing a zero Covid strategy to eliminate community transmission while investing in finding, testing, tracing and isolating to deal quickly with any cases that occur?

Will the Taoiseach agree to ban non-essential travel to Ireland and implement a 14-day mandatory quarantine for those people who must travel here, with all the appropriate safeguards? Preventing the import of the virus has been a crucial approach of those countries that have successfully implemented zero Covid strategies. It is especially important now, given the different strains of the virus.

Will the Taoiseach ensure the recommendation that workers who can work from home are allowed to do so is actually implemented? We have very many reports of workers who are not being allowed to work from home by their employers. When they contacted the Health and Safety Authority, HSA, about it, they were told this is at the employer's discretion. This is simply not good enough. Does the Taoiseach agree that the HSA must be empowered to enforce working from home, and employers who refuse to allow their employees to work from home should be fined?

Will the Taoiseach take action to close the loopholes in the list of essential services, which means that many workplaces closed in the first lockdown have been open in this third lockdown? An example is the national car test centres. I speak particularly about non-essential construction sites, including Intel at Leixlip, that continue to open and put workers in danger. I wrote to the Taoiseach about that on 8 January.

On the zero Covid approach, the Deputy has been very clear that the advice of NPHET should be followed, and the advice of NPHET and the Chief Medical Officer has been consistently against a zero Covid approach on the basis that they do not think it practical or that it could work. The most recent discussion on that was between Deputy Boyd Barrett and the Chief Medical Officer at the leaders' briefing that we had the week before last on the Covid strategy in general.

I have been very clear and open on the specific strategy I believe we should adopt. I do not believe in the herd immunity approach, for example, and I think no one in the House does. I also said I did not believe we could achieve a zero Covid strategy and deliver it. Even now, in the context of dealing with Covid, the situation in Northern Ireland is problematic. For example, even when we banned flights from the UK to the Republic of Ireland, people flew into Belfast. The prospect of sealing the Border between the North and the Republic of Ireland is not a reality or something anyone has suggested we should do. It would be the only realistic way of having a zero Covid strategy. Alternatively, there could be a two-island approach between the UK and Ireland. We are so integrated into the EU and UK economies that there are practical considerations around the application of a zero Covid strategy.

The Government has followed, broadly speaking, NPHET advice from the get-go. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Ireland has been in a phase of restrictions with different levels of severity from the beginning, except for the summer months. That is the reality. The Deputy spoke about his correspondence, and I am open to a full evaluation of all of this, from the beginning to the end of the pandemic, when it is over.

My absolute priority now is to focus on managing and dealing with the impact of Covid-19 on our society, our hospitals and our critical care systems, as well as on the vaccination programme, which is the light at the end of the tunnel. That programme will enable us to get back to some normality towards the latter part of this year.

The extraordinary levels that we witnessed over the Christmas period, with 6,000 new cases per day, were not predicted by anybody. Even the letter quoted by the Deputy makes it clear, based on the modelling, that if the R number was maintained at 1.2 the numbers would remain low but if it went above 1.4, we would exceed 400 cases per day in January 2021. The letter also says that threshold would be reached sooner if we started with higher case numbers. The letter also refers to the UK SAGE evidence on hospitality in terms of reducing the R number by between 0.1 and 0.2, which accords with our national data, and points out that the prevention of mixing between households might have an equivalent effect on the R number. We decided not to have mixing of households from 1 to 18 December which everybody forgets. To suggest that the problem was hospitality alone is to miss the other elements relevant to this particular wave of the pandemic. Seasonality was a factor, as was the new variant. Undoubtedly, socialisation was a factor as we moved into level 3 from a six-week lockdown at level 5.

I find the defence that nobody said it would be this bad to be bizarre. It is like saying, when one's mother tells one not to put one's hand into the fire, "Mummy, you just told me I would burn my hand; you did not say my whole body would burn". The Government was warned about what would happen. It is simply not true to say that the Government broadly followed NPHET's advice. The Government broke from that advice in October when it refused to go into lockdown and the Tánaiste set out to undermine NPHET publicly. It also broke from the advice in a very serious way at the start of December when NPHET said it should not open the pubs and restaurants but the Government proceeded to do so. The Government also broke from NPHET's advice close to Christmas, when the team recommended the closing of retail but the Government failed to do so.

On the zero-Covid strategy, my understanding of what Dr. Holohan said to Deputy Boyd Barrett at the meeting is that NPHET would like to see the elimination of the virus and if we could pursue that, it would be excellent but he did not believe it was politically feasible. On 4 August, NPHET wrote to the Government pointing out that the team had previously recommended mandatory quarantine for all passengers travelling to Ireland from overseas and that this remained NPHET's preferred recommendation. NPHET has been arguing for mandatory quarantine but the Taoiseach did not answer the questions I posed on that and on workers working from home. Current traffic levels are way above those seen in the first lockdown. What is going to be done about it? Are employers going to be allowed to flout the laws or will there be enforcement of the rules? The Taoiseach should not hide behind the North when he is not even in favour of a zero-Covid strategy. Such a strategy can be implemented even without agreement with the North, although it would be better with such agreement. The starting point is to agree it here, argue for it and then argue for it in the North.

All workers who can work from home should do so and all employers should facilitate that. That is Government policy and has been the Government message to the employer representative bodies. Only essential workers should have to leave their homes and the overwhelming message is for people to stay at home unless they are engaged in essential services.

I did not ever hear the CMO say that zero-Covid would be politically impossible and it would be wrong to infer that he was taking a political position on this. He said very clearly, and repeatedly, that the practicality of going to a zero-Covid strategy was something that he could not see. That has been the consistent position for quite some time, if not since the onset of the pandemic.

People are adhering to this lockdown but the Deputy makes a very important point. Irrespective of what restrictions are in place, whether on households or particular sectors, adherence to the guidelines is key. There were many superspreader events that had nothing at all to do with hospitality, although hospitality had a few too, no question. There is a need for all of us to adhere to the guidelines. Thankfully people are doing so and the numbers are coming down but with the UK variant, the issue will be how low they can fall. That can only happen if all of us, individually and collectively, work to get the numbers down by adhering to the guidance issued and the regulations that are in place.