I can definitely see the Deputy, given his former role, is on top of the detail of this area. I will pursue the issue on electric vehicle charging points in the current situation. I will make inquiries in this regard. The Minister is anxious to proceed with the new climate action plan as quickly as possible. There will be a series of Cabinet committee meetings in respect of this issue and, of course, considerable progress has been made on the wider legislation following engagement with the Oireachtas. There will be…

I will engage with the OPW in this regard to get alleviation as quickly as possible to the couples and landowners involved, and to the people living in such dreadful and very stressful situations because of the flooding in that particular area.

First of all, I want to sympathise with the families and all those who have been bereaved as a result of Covid-19, particularly those 93 families that we heard of yesterday. It illustrates the extraordinarily devastating impact that the virus has had on our entire society and community. May I also take the opportunity briefly on behalf of the Government and on behalf of the Oireachtas to wish President-elect Joe Biden the very, very best as he begins his journey as President of the United States? He is a very loyal…

-----of the Minister for Education on a range of issues that were raised by the unions on behalf of their members, all of which were acceded to and received positive responses.

I stand by the Minister's and the Government's sincere commitment to open schools for children with special needs. It is wrong to play politics with children with special needs, which is what I witnessed this morning in the Deputy's contribution.

I mean this in the best of good faith. I do not detect anything of substance in Deputy McDonald's contribution this morning on this matter. She has been going on about a plan B for a long time, with no concrete fleshing out of what that is. Schools reopened in September through partnership involving the parents, the unions, the Department and the Minister, and with a lot of resources provided by the Government. It was a successful reopening from September to Christmas. Public health played a very significant role i…

-----to children with additional needs. I think he meant that in good faith, but the point I am making is that it is clear that the Minister, Deputy Foley, equally felt that that was the trajectory of travel. What issued on the Friday evening was an agreed guidance, which was agreed by all the partners, to go out to the school management and principals because they needed to get an advance guidance framework prior to 21 January.

I accept the constructive nature of the Deputy's contribution, but I do not accept the premise on which he has based his question. I believe the Minister, Deputy Foley, has successfully led the reopening of schools in September to the Christmas period, and did so in partnership with management bodies, the teacher unions, the unions of special needs assistants, the representative body of students, and all of the stakeholders in education. It worked very well. There was a strong underpinning of that by the public hea…

I do not take the same interpretation as the Deputy of the interview he mentions. If we get down to the nuts and bolts of this, much of what was proposed in this House formed the substance of the talks and the engagement between the partners and the Minister. On 4 January the Deputy said that if schools are to close, the Department must assess a middle course between having all open and all closed and asked if we could find in-school solutions for certain categories like in other countries. He mentioned children of…

On the zero Covid approach, the Deputy has been very clear that the advice of NPHET should be followed, and the advice of NPHET and the Chief Medical Officer has been consistently against a zero Covid approach on the basis that they do not think it practical or that it could work. The most recent discussion on that was between Deputy Boyd Barrett and the Chief Medical Officer at the leaders' briefing that we had the week before last on the Covid strategy in general. I have been very clear and open on the specific s…

All workers who can work from home should do so and all employers should facilitate that. That is Government policy and has been the Government message to the employer representative bodies. Only essential workers should have to leave their homes and the overwhelming message is for people to stay at home unless they are engaged in essential services. I did not ever hear the CMO say that zero-Covid would be politically impossible and it would be wrong to infer that he was taking a political position on this. He said…

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue but I assure him that there is no need for people not to have confidence in the vaccination programme. It will be very comprehensive and will be ramped up as further vaccines are authorised and made available to us. The only limiting factor at the moment is the supply of vaccines. The only significant volumes we have received to date are from Pfizer BioNTech, which have enabled us to prioritise front-line healthcare workers and residents and staff of long-term care faciliti…

I agree. Every category the Deputy has just enumerated is not only being looked at, but worked on. A vaccinator workforce of scale, over and above existing hospital vaccinators, GPs and pharmacists, is needed. We need to draw upon resources. Some who are retired will be able to come forward, for example. There will be vaccination centres in different communities across the country. The national task force is working on this right now. We will be in a position to give a more comprehensive account in the future. The …

Indeed it has. The Minister will be in tomorrow. I believe this proposal has been circulated. There is to be a statement by the Minister for Education and questions and answers on the issue of the day regarding special education from 4.24 p.m. to 6.04 p.m. There is also to be a debate of nearly two hours on the vaccine programme comprising a fixed 100-minute debate and a ten-minute wrap-up.

We had understood there was broad agreement on the proposal. We are leaving it at that. It was a reasonable and generous response. The Minister is quite prepared to come before the House to deal with this.

The Government decided on this in respect of the post of Secretary General for the Department of Health given the enormous transformation that is required in our health service over the next number of years. Without doubt, it is the largest spending Department, which has had an extraordinary allocation again this year of an additional €4 billion. If we take one project, such as the National Children's Hospital, which now costs close to €2 billion-----

That is the point. This Department, and I am not going to-----

That predates me, but it speaks to the need to change how the Department of Health is structured and organised. Good reform has been happening within the Health Service Executive. The Department of Health, without question, needs a special focus over the next while to bring through Sláintecare, a universal healthcare system, to get value for money for the extraordinary allocations of funding made by this Government to help in that regard and to deal with all of what that entails.

I do not see how that would help at this stage to advance the vaccination programme, given the lines of authority and the statutory framework which governs health. We have appointed a national task force. The national immunisation advisory committee, NIAC, advises clinically on the vaccines in respect of safety and efficacy and prioritisation among groups. The HSE is essentially the operational arm of the entire project and it is accountable to the Secretary General of the Department of Health and, ultimately, to t…

I think the Deputies for raising this very important issue. Directions have issued and the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage has been clear that people should not be turned away from emergency accommodation on the grounds of locality or where they are from. I watched that programme. It is difficult enough for people who find themselves homeless where there is capacity and that emergency accommodation should be made available. The Minister has issued a circular, he has been clear in that, and he wi…