After 12 weeks of severe level 5 lockdown, the daily Covid-19 case numbers remain stubbornly high. Leaving aside the kite-flying that has been entirely unhelpful in recent weeks, the question for the Government is what exact steps it will take to address this problem to drive down numbers and allow some level of opening society and the economy.

The vast majority of people have severely restricted their movements and lives in what can only be described as a major national effort to limit the spread of the virus. However, increasingly, there is a sense that the Government has not played its part or done as it promised.

I will raise a number of key actions required and actions promised by Government. I seek the Tánaiste's response and the reasons for the Government's inaction across these various areas. First, why has the Government not addressed the long-standing issues with the under-resourcing of public health doctors? Every time I have raised this over the past 15 months, there have been promises but the matter remains unresolved. Public health doctors are critical in a pandemic. It is indefensible that this has not been resolved. Related to this is the lack of retrospective tracing to establish where exactly transmission is taking place. It is a basic thing and it beggars belief that it is not being done.

The issue of travel is arguably the biggest failure in the response to Covid. People have been instructed that they must only travel for essential reasons yet, inexplicably, the Government has stopped asking international travellers about this since 7 February. That week, 46% of people were travelling for non-essential reasons. Since then, we have no idea why people are travelling. On so-called home quarantining, the gardaí have only just established pilot projects in six divisions for enforcement purposes. Mandatory hotel quarantining was finally introduced this week. Who exactly is responsible for security? Is it the hotels, the security companies, the gardaí or the Defence Forces?

On vaccinations, when will the Government publish the detailed plan for the mass vaccination programme? What is the revised vaccination target for the end of the first quarter this year?

I thank the Deputy. I will do my best to answer as many questions as I can and, where I do not know the answer, I will ask the Minister for Health to correspond with the Deputy directly.

We are approaching 4,700 deaths in this State of people who died with Covid. We have reached the point where as many people have died from Covid-19 this year as did in all of last year. That is an extraordinary statistic, when one thinks about it. These are not just statistics but people with grieving families. That statistic demonstrates how serious the B.1.1.7 variant is and how different it is to the Wuhan strain or the wild strain that we dealt with last year. It perhaps demonstrates that getting down to low figures like ten, 50 or even 100 per day is not a prospect in the way it was last year because the virus has mutated and is more transmissible and deadly than the original wild strain. Despite the enormous efforts of the Irish people, who are doing all the right things, we have got stuck around 500 or 600 cases per day and it is hard to see how we will get much lower than that.

What are the things we are doing to attempt to reduce the numbers? We have increased border biosecurity. It is now the strictest in the European Union, with mandatory hotel quarantine starting tomorrow for people coming from more than 30 countries and anyone coming without a negative test from any country, including non-essential and essential travel. We will add many countries to that list in the coming weeks, once we have the system up and running. We have started walk-in PCR testing for people who have no symptoms in areas of high incidence, five of them to start-----

Will the Tánaiste answer some of the questions I asked?

The first question the Deputy asked was what we were doing to bring down Covid and that is the question I am answering. We are speeding up the vaccine roll-out. We have given more than 700,000 vaccines at this stage. We expect to receive more than 1 million vaccines by the end of this month but they will not all be in people's arms. It will probably be around 800,000, and another 1 million or so in April. We will have the report on antigen testing soon and that will be used in outbreaks in other places like work places. We are increasing our testing and tracing capacity and there has never been any restriction on resources in terms of taking on contact tracers or people in public health departments. We have always said to NPHET, the Department of Health and the HSE that this is probably the cheapest thing we could do. It is much cheaper than the pandemic unemployment payment or the wage subsidy scheme to take on public health staff and contact tracers. There has never been a restriction on that.

To answer the question on public health doctors, I believe this should be a consultant-led service and negotiations are under way between the Government and the Irish Medical Organisation, IMO, about that. Should the IMO wish to refer those discussions to the Workplace Relations Commission or the Labour Court, both of which are under my remit, we would be happy to hear the case. Let us not be too simplistic about this. There are a lot of public health doctors in Scotland, England and Wales, many of them consultants. Yet their death rate and case rates are way higher than here. Let us not suggest that will be a silver bullet.

I think the Tánaiste was really disingenuous in the answer he gave there. I asked him specific questions about things the Government had promised to do to play its part in the response to Covid. They were on things we have been through umpteen times and he did not answer a single one of them. How can he expect the public to stay with the Government and to stay the course when the Government is not doing what it said it would do? I listed all of those things.

The Tánaiste referred to the new variants. They are the big threat and they change everything. However, they have been allowed into this country by the failure of the Government to address the issue of travel. There was a basic question on people's reason for travel and the Government stopped asking people that. How can people have faith in the Government if it will not address the things it has promised to do for the last 12 months? The Government has to do much better. People will just give up on this unless the Government plays its part.

I answered the Deputy's question. I said we had increased border security to have the strictest biosecurity in the European Union, introduced walk-in PCR testing for people with no symptoms in five parts of the country and accelerated the vaccine roll-out. Antigen testing will be coming into play and we are increasing our tracing capacity.

What the Deputy said about the B.1.1.7 variant is a bit disingenuous. Unfortunately, it would have inevitably come into the country. It does not just come through ports and airports. It also comes in, and came in, through Northern Ireland, as did the Spanish strain which contributed to the second wave. Scotland brought in mandatory hotel quarantine for all arrivals over a month ago and has found that it has not been a silver bullet for it. Its case numbers are similar to ours and it has had the same issues as us in relation to a land border.