John McGahon (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

To lead off on the final few points that Senator Byrne made, my sister, Ruth, is 20 years of age. She is in her second year in UCD and she has spent her whole second year on Zoom lectures at home. She does not know it, but I feel so sorry for people of her generation who are missing out on what are the best years of their lives. I look back on my three years in UCD as the happiest times of my life. They really were superb. Young people in this country have been scapegoated for some of the bad behaviour that we see sometimes by the curtain twitchers - the people on Twitter. These young people have been literally locked up and cooped up for the past year and a half. They have borne the brunt of this harder than anybody else. I am certainly in a much luckier position going through this than I would have been at the age of 20 or 21. We need to acknowledge the sacrifices that young people - teenagers and those in their early 20s - have made over the past 12 months.

That leads me on to the second point I want to make in relation to students. I would appreciate the Leas-Chathaoirleach giving me a little latitude on this. Speaking of the mental health struggles for students, I have been doing a lot of work with the students at Dundalk Institute of Technology, DkIT, in my town of Dundalk in the past week. They have, unfortunately, got caught in the crossfire of an industrial dispute between the Teachers' Union of Ireland, TUI, and the president of DkIT, and their examination results are being withheld from them. They are now eight days without having their examination results. Hopefully, the matter will be resolved over the weekend but we do not know yet whether that will happen. The president of the Dundalk Institute of Technology Students' Union, Mr. Taidgh Kavanagh, is an impressive young man who is doing quite a lot of work for the students there. We support the principle of the TUI and the work relations committee which they are engaged with. Unfortunately, the other side walked away from the table. The DkIT management side has walked away from negotiations.As a result, students have been caught in the crossfire and their exam results are being withheld. I will take this opportunity to urge the DkIT management to walk back to the negotiating table, come to a compromise and ensure that students' results are released to them. That is the fairest approach to take. In this debate on mental health, imagine the difficult year that those students have had. They need to know their results, especially if they are in their final year and want to know whether they will get a 1.1, 2.1 or 2.2, which affects where they will go to college. That they do not have their results yet is a disgrace, so I hope that the situation is resolved as soon as possible.

I will turn to my final couple of points on mental health. RTÉ's "Claire Byrne Live" and other television shows are like the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse at times. I have never seen more doom and gloom. I have stopped watching them. The point is always made that they have to present the other view, but just because it is the other view does not necessarily mean it is right. Zero Covid is a fallacy. I say that because I am from a Border region. I live 15 minutes from the Northern Irish Border and know how bloody hard it would be to secure it. This talk is nuts. Besides trying to achieve zero Covid that way, we have three major ports in Ireland - Dublin Port, Rosslare Europort and the Port of Cork. Freight gets into New Zealand via containers, with one massive ship bringing in 1,000 containers. In Ireland, we have what is called ro-ro, which involves approximately 1,000 individual trucks and drivers coming in and out. How would zero Covid work in that light? How would it work if someone from Belfast or Newry travelled down to Dundalk to do some shopping? It is a fallacy. I understand that people are desperate and are trying to cling on to something, but zero Covid is not the way to go about this. It is like throwing a lifeline to a drowning guy who is looking for a bit of hope in the depths of January when we are all sick of restrictions, lockdown and everything else. We will be proven right on that in a couple of months or a year when all of this is ended around the world, the nightmare is over and we can look back at what worked and what did not.