Anglo-Irish Relations
Dail Éireann — 2021-11-10
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

I would not be jumping over myself to have a personal or political relationship with Boris Johnson to be honest and I am certainly no fan of his but did the Taoiseach discuss with him the differing strategies on dealing with the Covid pandemic? The one thing that I will give him a little credit for, and on which I think that the Taoiseach should take a leaf from his book, is that in the UK, you can get free antigen tests - as many as you want or need - as part of the effort to screen for the presence of Covid-19 whereas here in Ireland it costs €100 to get 20 tests. I heard a public health doctor suggest that the reason the Government may be slow in making antigen tests available and using them as a weapon to deal with the pandemic was because of cost.

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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/2021-11-10/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-11-10