Health (Preservation and Protection and other Emergency Measures in the Public Interest) Bill 2020: Committee and Remaining Stages Seanad Éireann — 2020-03-20 ============================================================ Simon Harris (FG), Wicklow That is very much my intention and the intention of my Department, so much so that I have now taken a conscious decision such that any time the national public health emergency team makes a recommendation to me, quite frankly, to do anything, I get the recommendation by way of written letter from the Chief Medical Officer, which I then publish in full. It is my intention to continue in that regard. If we want people to follow public health advice, they need to know the rationale behind it. In this jurisdiction people can take comfort from the fact that politicians are making decisions on public health issues based on public health expert advice, not political populism. --- 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/seanad/2020-03-20/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:47:28+00:00 Sitting date: 2020-03-20