Tá mé ag bogadh ar aghaidh go dtí Páirtí an Lucht Oibre. Más é bhur dtoil é, tá Cathaoirleach anseo agus tá mé ag déanamh mo dhíchill. Glaoim ar an Teachta Kelly.

Before I get on to the main issue I want to ask the Tánaiste a question. The Minister for Health was in the Chamber earlier. I asked him how many vaccines were brought into the country this week. He said 48,000. He is wrong. According to figures given to a number of journalists, in particular Craig Hughes, who has published them in the past few minutes, it was 23,570. How can a Minister come into the House and not know how many vaccines came into the country this week? Will the Tánaiste please address that with the Government? It is scary, very scary, as was the Minister's performance.

The Tánaiste is on record as saying he does not believe in zero Covid. I do not believe in the phrase "zero Covid" myself, but I do believe in the tenets of it. I believe in an aggressive national suppression strategy. Let us be frank. I am trying to be constructive. The Government has made many mistakes during this crisis. The Opposition has also made mistakes. There is no point in going through them. We all know. It is a case of hands up on all sides. We now know the vaccine will not be the panacea for 2021 that we thought it would be. It is going to take much longer, so we need to work on suppressing the virus. The Taoiseach has said it will be a long-term suppression strategy. I want to get to the point of distinguishing the difference between the Government's long-term strategy and what many of us in the Opposition are saying. We need to give people a chance of some form of normality in 2021, whether it is for funerals of close family members, which I have experienced myself recently, weddings, community, sport or getting the hospitality sector back up and running. I believe the public are ahead of us. Conor McMorrow's report on "Prime Time" last Tuesday night was the straw that broke the camel's back. We saw flights coming in from a number of destinations, but Lanzarote in particular. We heard they were full of Irish people. Everybody is making such sacrifices. The public are ahead of us and they want us to suppress the virus. As part of that, they want to see people being quarantined when they come into this country, not the half-baked strategy that is there already. We must also have a strategy for the Border - I believe the Government has taken on board some of our suggestions in that regard - and also on managing airports. Then, panzer-like, we can focus in on where the virus is in the community and suppress it. With the vaccines coming, we then give an opening to this country and bring back people's civil liberties and what they are allowed to do.

I thank the Deputy.

Will the Government travel this road with us? Is it the case that we do not have the legislation or the infrastructure in place, but that the Government will travel the same road as many of us are suggesting?

Go raibh maith agat, a Theachta.

I hope that is the space the Government is going into.

I thank the Deputy. I welcome the constructive suggestions that have come from the Labour Party in recent weeks. He is right; neither the Government, the Opposition, any government, NPHET nor any expert has got everything right when it comes to managing this pandemic. What we all hope is that when this is over we will have been seen to have got most things right most of the time. I know the Deputy does not like the term zero Covid. Labour is proposing a different strategy, which is that of aggressive suppression. I think that is a term that is often used in Australia to describe the strategy in some states there. We do need to move away from slogans to the actual detail as to what different strategies mean. As I mentioned yesterday, if one asks supporters or advocates of zero Covid, it means different things to different people. For some people it is a long, hard lockdown to get to zero community transmission for 14 days in a row. For others, one does not have to get to zero at all; it is just about best endeavours to get there. For some, it is all about mandatory hotel quarantine at ports and airports. For others, it is about many other things. I agree with some things such as aggressive test, trace and isolate, mass antigen testing and others I do not agree with such as a de facto hard Border between North and South, preventing people from moving north and south or turning some of our Border counties into buffer zones. However, I do think there needs to be a detailed debate and discussion on these issues. We need to talk about the practicalities and we also need to talk about the pros and cons. Nobody should enter any discussion or debate on these matters by ruling out any strategy or dismissing or rejecting any proposals or suggestions. That is very much my approach and that of the Government.

As Deputy Kelly will be aware, our strategy now is to get Covid levels down. We want to get numbers down as low as is possible. I do not know how low that is, but as low as is possible between now and 5 March. That then will allow us to click back in with our testing and contact tracing to keep a handle on the virus so that it does not slip out of our control once again. In that period, we do want to bring about the phased reopening of schools, starting with children with special and additional needs, for reasons that people understand. During that period as well, we are cracking down very severely on international travel. International travel is already down 97%. We already require people entering the country to have a negative PCR test result. If they do not have that, they will be subject to mandatory hotel quarantine. People coming from high-risk countries such as Brazil and South Africa are going to be subject to mandatory hotel quarantine whether they have a negative test result or not. It is our intention to expand that, as we develop the capability and capacity to do so. We do not have that now, but we are building it up and it will allow us to extend mandatory hotel quarantine more widely as the weeks go on.

I welcome the fact that the Tánaiste said he is not stuck on one policy or one strategy and that he is open to looking at what I and others are proposing now. I predict he will end up coming closer to us. I do not say that everything I say is 100% the way to go, but we are willing to work with the Government to ensure the best strategy. The public have had enough. We cannot go through 2021 the same way as 2020, with the numbers going up and down. When we get the numbers down, we have to keep them down.

In fairness to the Tánaiste, in recent days he said we have to save the summer holidays, there will possibly be no travel at Christmas, yet on 4 March we will exit to level 4. His position has moved. What I am saying quite clearly is that through a suppression strategy based on bringing in the legislation and the quarantine infrastructure and doing all that I said, and more, we can get to that point and keep it there. I know the Tánaiste likes to be on the right side of an issue and of history.

I thank the Deputy.

I urge him to come with us on this road and to adopt this strategy.

I thank the Deputy.

It may take a little bit of time and it might take legislation but we can do it quickly.

We may well end up in the same place. There are many things that we have done in the past year to fight this pandemic that I never thought we would do. The Government and I will always keep an open mind on these things. We may not be as far apart as people may think. When we have a discussion like this, in slogans, it misses the detail. This is the complexity of what we have to deal with and there are a number of things that we will have to do to defeat the pandemic. There is no silver bullet or single action that will make it all right this summer. Unfortunately, that is not a promise that anyone can make or keep.

Our strategy is to suppress the virus, to get as low as we can go over the next couple of weeks, to roll out and speed up vaccination because that will change the picture- again, it is not a panacea, but it will change the picture considerably - and for us only to open up where it is safe and sustainable to do so. We do not want to go to level 4 on 5 March only to have to go back again three or four weeks later. That is the very strong demand from the public now. They want to know that if we are going to ease restrictions on 5 March or whenever, that it will be sustained.

Go raibh maith agat, a Thánaiste.

Nobody should say "permanent". No matter what strategy one has, there is the risk of having to reimpose lockdowns. Unfortunately, we have seen that.

We are over time.

We have seen that in Melbourne.

People want to know that whatever we do is going to be sustainable.