Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín has told the Dáil that the cost of what he described as the “overextended and over-severe” Covid lockdown would come to €41 billion euros.
No other European country restricted as severe and as long as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael did, the Meath West TD said. “No other country took the route that we took and it cost no other country the same in financial terms.”
“Countries like Denmark and Germany opened pubs and restaurants, for example, months before we did. They did it safely, with antigen testing, using proper logic to open those services, and they allowed people to go back to work earlier, and it cost their countries radically less as a result.”
The Gov handling of Covid is going to cost the state €41bn.
This is multiples of the cost of the vast majority of other EU countries.
This is roughly the same cost as Bank Bailout
Yet there is stoney silence from the political establishment.
Only Aontú is raising this issue pic.twitter.com/GW8PMqUSPw
— Peadar Tóibín TD (@Toibin1) September 23, 2021
He said that the increase in spending in this country during the Covid crisis was an outlier – and outstripped other EU countries and the european average. “Our annual spending in 2020 increased by 20%. In Denmark it increased by 5%, it France it increased by 8%, the European average was less than 10%. Our spending was a radical outlier.”
He said that Ireland would pay €19 billion into the EU Covid Fund, and receive just €2 billion in return, and that the government’s was mirroring their actions in the banking crisis of 2008, where we sought to be the “best boy in the class”.
Deputy Tóibín said that the instincts of the government were “insular and inward looking”, and that the majority of people who died of Covid caught Covid in nursing homes, but that was no public investigation into how that was handled.