Quite honestly, I do not think anybody knows what the Taoiseach is saying. What exactly is he talking about regarding travel? I have consistently said that the failure of this Government and the last Government to address the issue of travel has been the biggest single failing in the response to Covid-19. At no point have we had a coherent and effective system to address the threat posed by inward travel. As my colleague said, this virus does not come in on the wind; it comes in via people travelling on planes and boats. We have never had a serious attempt to tackle that aspect.

At this point, people are getting pretty fed up of all the sacrifices they are making. Life is very difficult for everybody at the moment. People expect that the Government will play its part in doing the things it should be doing. I refer to having proper testing and tracing in place and ensuring we have effective restrictions to drive down the virus to a very low level, which we did last summer. People also expect the Government to deal with the issue of the importation of the virus. The Government has not done any of those things adequately, and that is why we are in this situation now. We are in a third wave, without any prospect of getting out of it for the foreseeable future. The Taoiseach is not setting out any pathway ahead and no strategy is in place to deal with this situation.

What exactly is the Taoiseach talking about regarding restrictions on travel? The question of mandatory hotel quarantine is absolutely essential and we should be doing that for everybody. I cannot understand why the Taoiseach will not go with that policy, which has proved so successful in other countries where it has been operated. He just has not provided any explanation in that regard.

What does the Taoiseach understand the term "home quarantining" to mean? Two of his Ministers - the Minister for Health last night, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs today - have conveyed very confused understandings of what that term means. In the context of international travel, therefore, what does the Taoiseach mean by the term "home quarantining"? What are people being expected to do? Whatever about having home quarantining to reduce community cases, the point here is that we are talking about international travel and the threat of new and stronger variants of the virus which we do not know anything about. What does the Taoiseach mean by "mandatory home quarantining"? How does he see that working? What is the requirement for somebody sharing accommodation with family or housemates? How does the Taoiseach see that working, and how does he see it being policed?

I disagree with the Deputy's assessments of the Government's responses to the pandemic. We are in an unprecedented era of the most draconian measures regarding people's movements and personal liberties that we have ever experienced. We are in this situation because of a global pandemic. That is in respect of the level 5 restrictions which we now have in operation regarding people's personal movements.

We now have Garda checkpoints at airports restricting people and penalising those in breach of the level 5 regulations. This is absolutely unprecedented. We are going to put in place hotel facilities to facilitate mandatory quarantining for people who come into Ireland from countries such as South Africa, Brazil and the UK. On the advice of the Chief Medical Officer a person will have to take a mandatory PCR test if he or she has not taken one in advance of coming into the country. It will be an offence not to do that. For home quarantining, people will have to stay within their homes. This will be enforced by An Garda Síochána and others.

Will it be in their rooms?

How do we police someone in his or her bedroom?

I ask the Taoiseach to answer the question.

I ask the Deputy to answer that question in the context of common sense and practicality around enforcement. That said, the public health advice on the specific circumstances of cases will apply to people as they apply across the board. They are very clear issues. There is a balance to be struck in us getting it right around personal freedoms, legal enforceability and sanctions. We are taking comprehensive legal advice on this as well as ensuring that we get the numbers down for travel into the State and that there is an effective quarantining system. There is legislation and regulations that have been passed, for example, the removal of short-term visa free travel into the country from many countries has already happened and been regulated for. All of that will have an impact on numbers coming into the country and it is having an impact already on the numbers coming in. Deputy Shortall said it has been a consistent failure, but Deputies from her party have stood up in this House and criticised the Government around the lack of supports for airports and for airlines on the basis of our policy of being so restrictive on foreign travel. The Deputy cannot have both ways in that respect.

That is not having it both ways.

In response to the issues, I have outlined that this will be a very severe regime for the quarantining of people. It involves the quarantining in hotels of people from certain countries where there is a particular concern around the importation of the variant and home quarantining of Irish citizens and people more generally, with follow up in terms of enforcement.

The Taoiseach has not answered any of the questions I asked him. His point about support for the airlines is nonsense. Of course we need to support airlines and airline workers if there are serious controls on travel. Throughout last year we had advice to self-isolate, which did not work. We know there was not any enforcement of this and that there was no serious system in place. This changed to restrict one's movements. We know there was no policing of that and it did not work. In Christmas week the Government was advising people to self quarantine at home. We know how that ended. None of these things is enforceable. When I asked the Taoiseach how exactly would quarantining at home work he did not answer the question, but he talked about people's rights and not being able to police what goes on in homes. This is exactly what we have been saying. This idea of home quarantining is unenforceable. The Taoiseach has admitted this himself. What is he talking about? The Taoiseach mentioned personal freedoms.

The Deputy's time is up.

Everybody is paying a huge price in the curtailment of their personal freedoms.

Thank you Deputy, but the time is up.

The Taoiseach needs to put a system in place of mandatory hotel quarantining so that we have some prospect of people being able to exercise personal freedoms and so we can have some element of opening up the country to normality. That can be done with a zero Covid policy. It cannot be done-----

Deputy Shortall please, the time is up.

-----with a confused plan that the Taoiseach has now.

Can we hear the Taoiseach, please?

With respect, the Deputy is a very late convert to zero Covid. The Deputy has been see-sawing around the place from the Opposition side.

That is not true.

It is true, and I can point to some of the Deputy's contributions on that.

Please do.

The Deputy certainly did not oppose the lifting of the measures at the beginning of December. The Deputy certainly did not oppose them in the Dáil-----

A number of us briefed-----

I want to say, if I am allowed to speak, that people have adhered-----

-----at the beginning of December-----

The vast majority of people-----

Will the Taoiseach explain-----

Deputy Shortall, will you allow the Taoiseach to respond?

The people have adhered, by and large, to the restrictions. When one makes something illegal and a penal provision is made, it has an impact in people's behaviour. It has had an impact on people's behaviour. Consider mask wearing, for example. I pushed very hard to make mask wearing compulsory in public-----

Will the Taoiseach-----

-----but we were told it would not be enforceable. If we brought it in for public transport, we were asked who would enforce it. Would it be the bus drivers or the gardaí and all of that kind of stuff? I heard all the problems about it. It was enforced from day one by the people. The people themselves adhered to it.

The Taoiseach's time is up.

Likewise, this measure will have an impact.

The Taoiseach said it would not be enforceable.

I said in respect of the bedroom that it was not enforceable and the Deputy deliberately twisted it in her response. Home quarantining can be-----

The time is up, please.

What are we talking about? Is it going into a house?

Home quarantining can be more readily enforceable than just swinging into somebody's bedroom, and the Deputy knows this.

We are going ahead now, and we will hear from Deputy Boyd Barrett.