It is important to remember that at the heart of this issue is that the State has been quite happy, down through the years and continuing to today, to fight children who have special needs and their families. This is about a denial of basic rights to people with special needs. If successive Governments had not pursued that policy, this would not have arisen. Despite the 2004 Act, the 2005 Act and the UN convention, the State is still fighting children and their families. Families still need to fight for basic servi…

Will the Minister sort out the issue of recruitment of vaccinators? There are huge problems and we are all getting complaints about it. The application form is 14 pages long. No phone number is available for people to ring to clarify any point. People are complaining about their details getting lost. They are also complaining that they are repeatedly being asked the same questions for the same information. It is hard to see why on earth there are these glitches in the recruitment process. Will the Minister sort the…

Not daily.

I am talking about what is delivered.

What is the current target?

The number administered.

After 12 weeks of severe level 5 lockdown, the daily Covid-19 case numbers remain stubbornly high. Leaving aside the kite-flying that has been entirely unhelpful in recent weeks, the question for the Government is what exact steps it will take to address this problem to drive down numbers and allow some level of opening society and the economy. The vast majority of people have severely restricted their movements and lives in what can only be described as a major national effort to limit the spread of the virus. How…

Will the Tánaiste answer some of the questions I asked?

I think the Tánaiste was really disingenuous in the answer he gave there. I asked him specific questions about things the Government had promised to do to play its part in the response to Covid. They were on things we have been through umpteen times and he did not answer a single one of them. How can he expect the public to stay with the Government and to stay the course when the Government is not doing what it said it would do? I listed all of those things. The Tánaiste referred to the new variants. They are the b…

Sometimes I question the value of these sessions because we do not get any new information. We frequently ask for information and the Minister promises to send us notes, but the notes do not arrive. For example, last week, I asked about the Moderna vaccine and the fact that, at that point, less than a quarter of Moderna deliveries to this country had been administered. I never got an answer on that. I appeal to the Minister to be much more forthcoming in giving information and data generally. All of this should be …

I will put my questions quickly and, hopefully, get the Minister's response. I agree with the point made by earlier speakers about the need for transparency. That is very important. All the information relating to the number of vaccines that are delivered here, the number available, the number being held back and the number administered should be public information. Everybody understands that the supply is volatile. The more open the Minister is about that, the better. People can then understand the situation. We h…

Yes. With regard to the Moderna vaccine, the Minister said that 40,200 doses have been delivered to this country up to the end of February, yet before 28 February only 9,300 were administered. I do not know if the Minister can give me an answer today, but perhaps he will provide it to me as soon as possible. It is puzzling why that is the case. My next question relates to what will happen when we get large quantities of vaccine. We know that 1.2 million to 1.3 million doses should be coming into the country in each…

It is on the data hub.

What about the plan-----

I want to ask about the vaccination programme because I am concerned about two aspects of it. Vaccines provide great hope for people. The vast majority of people are looking forward to getting vaccinated and are keen to know when they are likely to receive a vaccine. For that reason, I think we need to improve the data that are available. Many of us have been looking to the Minister for Health to provide daily figures about the performance of the vaccination programme. That is important. The Taoiseach and the Minis…

The figures that are available now indicate that we are not administering the vaccines that have come in. Perhaps the Government needs to update the figures on what is coming in, but it is important it does that so that there is transparency about this. It is not a matter of giving me the figures. These are figures that should be publicly available. It is only when the Government is transparent about this that people will have confidence that the programme is running well. I again appeal to the Taoiseach to make th…

-----so that we can get the vaccines out as quickly as they arrive.

It is the ones that are delivered to the country.

It is the number that we are receiving.

We do not have the figures. Why does the Government not publish them?