Covid-19 Pandemic Dail Éireann — 2020-11-11 ============================================================ Peadar Tóibín (AON), Meath West I have raised this before. Covid is obviously a serious illness and we obviously need to do the best we can to reduce its incidence. Ireland is the sixth most restrictive country on the planet, yet it has the third lowest incidence of Covid in European terms. That would be fine but there is a massive cost to the restrictions in terms of patients missing cancer appointments, the large number of people waiting for cancer screening, the mental illness pandemic and the complete flooring of the retail trade, whereby 51% of business is now being transacted online. My question is very simple. Why is the Covid committee choosing a strategy that is a radical outlier in international terms? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2020-11-11/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:48:46+00:00 Sitting date: 2020-11-11