I want to raise the change the Government has made to the vaccination plan, as announced yesterday evening. This is both a huge and an astonishing decision that was made without prior notice and, it seems, without any consultation with the groups of front-line workers who will be affected by it. It has come as a great shock and has caused great anger for SNAs, childcare workers, teachers, gardaí and workers in retail that the Taoiseach has now decided they should not be afforded some level of priority in recognition of the real exposure and heightened risk they face in contracting this virus. It is abundantly clear that the Government has changed tack because the system it has in place is not fit for purpose. We have seen many instances of the flaws and fault lines in the Government's approach but this is the most astonishing admission of failure on its part. More importantly, it has caused huge anxiety among those front-line workers. I do not know how the Taoiseach can defend or explain away the removal of priority from those groups. It is wrong and it will cause unnecessary anxiety and real worry and fear among those workers. I ask the Taoiseach to reverse the decision in this regard.

It is incredible that the Deputy can stand up and speak in the manner in which she has done. This is exactly the scheme that was designed in the North, to which Sinn Féin was a party and which it implemented. The latter is a scheme based on age. We are taking medical and clinical advice in respect of this change. We want to vaccinate people as fast as we possibly can. We are in the middle of a pandemic. Higher volumes of vaccines are coming in. We want to make sure that the most vulnerable of all workers and key workers are vaccinated first. It must be remembered that the prioritisation of the different categories of key workers had not been identified. Such workers range right across the board, from childcare workers to bus drivers, to taxi drivers - you name it. The Deputy should not pretend that it is all simple and easy. It is more important to take the clinical advice which, on the basis of the reviews taken, is telling us that age is the most determinant factor in whether a person gets sick or severely ill or can die. We can get older childcare workers and older teachers, for example, vaccinated much faster in this way.

The news that 14 days after people are fully vaccinated they can meet indoors is both great and to be welcomed. I have seen directly the impact this news has had on elderly people. It does, however, raise issues about where we go from here because this circle of people will get wider. Where are we going regarding vaccination passports or certificates, green certificates or whatever they will be called? The UK is contemplating the introduction of these, as are Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Greece and Cyprus, who are all rolling along with producing vaccination passports. What work has been done in Ireland in this regard? Where does the Government stand on this matter? There are obvious moral and ethical questions and legal issues involved. Where does the Government stand on vaccination passports and what work has been done to date in respect of them?

We have established a senior officials group under the stewardship of my Department to consider the policy implications of such certificates. On the technical side, we are progressing work to make sure that we develop a technical solution that would be interoperable with an EU-wide system for certification, once a person has received a vaccination. The EU is also talking about negative PCR test results and evidence as to whether a person has recovered from Covid. The policy implications are, as the Deputy stated, more significant and need to be teased out. Again, we would be happy to take any submissions from Members of the House or the various parties.

While I accept that a rationale was outlined yesterday, there was considerable moving of the goalposts in the context of our vaccination programme. That will have ramifications. Can the Taoiseach guarantee that all of our educators, SNAs, home school liaison staff and teachers, particularly those in primary schools who would be a younger cohort, will be vaccinated by September in order to ensure that we can fully reopen our schools safely?

That is a fair point in the context of the beginning of the next academic year. The target is to administer the first dose of the vaccine to 80% of adults by the end of June and that 70% will be fully vaccinated by the end of July. By July and August, therefore, we will be dealing with the latter end of the vaccination programme. With the supplies coming in we are in a good position to achieve that. The more important point is that those who are older or who may be vulnerable due to particular conditions - I refer here to teachers, childcare workers, bus drivers, factory workers, retail workers and a range of other key workers - had not yet been prioritised one over the other. There is a great deal of merit in saying that those who are most vulnerable in those key worker categories will be brought up the queue now and vaccinated earlier. This is one of the outcomes of this. This is the advice from NIAC.