Health (Amendment) Bill 2021: Committee and Remaining Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2021-03-01
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Stephen Donnelly (FF), Wicklow

I ask colleagues to think about that. If zero Covid is not the answer, and I do not think it is, why are we doing what we are doing? The advice I have from the Attorney General is that this must have a proportionality test because it is about depriving people of their liberty for two weeks in a designated facility, which is a very serious thing to do. There needs to be a proportionality test. The second point is that it is public health-led.
The language used by Senator Higgins in putting forward this idea is that there must be consistency and that there is a question as to whether there has been favouritism. These are charges that are essentially being made against the public health officials providing this advice. I doubt if that is what the Senator means, and it may be that this is a charge that she is making against the Government, but this is a public health recommendation that we are getting.
I point-blank refute the idea that our Chief Medical Officer is somehow playing favourites with one region of the world versus another. This is based on public health advice-----

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2021-03-01/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:06+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-03-01