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Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly has criticised “the whiff of xenophobia” in parts of the Dáil debate last week on the introduction of mandatory hotel quarantining.
Mr Donnelly said “I’ve heard people say we must protect ‘our people from foreign people’. That’s not what this is about.”
Insisting that the quarantine measures were proportionate he pointed out that people’s close contacts had increased again from two to 2.6 and while the reproduction rate at which coronavirus replicates was close to one “it’s still close to one”.
But Independent Senator Alice Mary Higgins said “we have to be sure that there is no element of favouritism or xenophobia in which countries are designated or not designated”.
She warned against “introducing countries we don’t mind offending, because it looks like that at the moment”.
They were speaking on Monday in the Seanad on the Health (Amendment) Bill which provide for 14 days of mandatory hotel quarantining of travellers, from 33 countries currently on the so-called “category 2” list, from where the risk of transmission of Covid-19 or mutations of the diseases is high.
The legislation which already been passed in the Dáil also increases fixed notice penalties for non-essential travel from €500 to €2,000. Breaches of mandatory hotel quarantining include penalties of up to €4,000 and or a one month prison sentence for a first offence.
Mr Donnelly said “the measures provided for in the Bill will be applicable to all travellers from a designated state and a person’s nationality has no bearing on the matter” and he said the measures were proportionate.
He told the Seanad that “we are moving away from describing these variants as the Brazilian variant or the South African variant. We’re moving towards calling them by their names, such as B117”.
Warning against the potential for xenophobia, he said the Oireachtas had an important role to ensure that people understood the measures “are not a reaction to foreigners”.
The history of xenophobia and racism was “linked to the perceived fear of importation of disease”.
But Ms Higgins said that “when we hear of xenophobia it feels very strange to look at the list and see that it’s nearly entirely countries of the global south when for example we know that the United States has all of those variants and indeed new variants, B1427 and B1429”.
Opposition parties re-introduced amendments refused in the Dáil to apply the quarantine to travellers from all countries. Ms Higgins said she was introducing a “more moderate amendment to ensure that there is at least consistency in the application of these criteria”.
Mr Donnelly said, however, that Ms Higgins’s amendment was “charging our Chief Medical Officer with playing favourites on category 2 countries” but he was not doing that.
Labour Senator Ivana Bacik who introduced her party’s amendment to extend the quarantine to all countries, said “the balance is currently skewed in favour of non-essential international travel to and from Ireland and against travel outside our 5 km zones and against the re-opening of our schools and work places”.
Ireland’s lockdown measures were among the most restrictive in the EU she said, adding that “we’re somehow so inured and institutionalised to the restrictions we’re living under that we see the restrictions on international travel as draconian and breaching civil liberties”.
“Normal civil liberties’ protections are clearly being undermined and to impose tighter restrictions on international travel strikes a much more proportionate balance.”
Fianna Fáil Senator Lorraine Clifford Lee welcomed the three months’ sunset clause on the Bill after which it will have to come back to the Dáil and Seanad to be extended.
Sinn Féin Senator Niall Ó Donnghaile said gardaí “have had no operational guidance or instruction on how to implement the quarantining and this is unacceptable”.
He aid that “considering the number of people in general entering the State the gardaí will have to be involved”.
Independent Senator Gerard Craughwell said there should be border checks “to ensure the same restrictions apply on the Border” if the same restrictions are not in place in the North’s ports and airports.