There seems to be a push to get all the kids back to school and it is understandable that people want that. It was said in yesterday's Irish Independent that it has figures that show that the cohort of people next most susceptible to Covid during the third wave are young people, from ages 16 to 18, and so reopening the schools has huge implications. Has the Government ensured that the work was done to make our schools safe? I mention the size of the classrooms. Have we acquired more spaces so that children and young people can be spaced out further away from each other? Have we employed more teachers so that we can guarantee that the class sizes are smaller? Have we dealt with the question of ventilation in the classroom? We are told that 80% of our schools have poor ventilation and we have had nine months or, arguably, a whole year to do this work. How much of it has been done?

A lot of extra staff have been hired and a lot of resources have been provided to schools to adapt to Covid by purchasing screens, sanitisers and all of those things. A lot has been done in that regard. The advice we have from NPHET and our public health doctors and scientists is that schools are safe places but no place is 100% safe. Any place in which people are going to interact carries a certain risk. We have to bear in mind, however, the high risk of denying children and young adults their education, the opportunity to meet other young people and the opportunity to develop. We have to bear that in mind in any decisions that we make. The World Health Organization has been strong on that matter too. It strongly argues that the last thing that should be done is to close schools and the first places to be opened are schools because of the wider benefits of that.