Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 2 June 2020
Special Committee on Covid-19 Response
Travel Restrictions
Mr. Jim Breslin:
There are many levels to what the landscape will look like. The first element is the willingness of the public to travel and there will be anxiety on the part of members of the public for a considerable period. The European authorities have worked with the airline industry to devise procedures for those who must travel and physical distancing and other elements can be put in place around that. Ultimately, this will be based on national authorities making an assessment of where they are with their public health strategy and moving between phases in the extent of opening facilities. That may involve different arrangements in different countries. Some countries are very much in the take-off phase currently. Examples are in South America and eastern Europe etc., and people would be much more reluctant to have an arrangement for reciprocal travel in those cases than if we were all successful in suppressing the virus, for example, and where two countries had very low levels of community transmission.
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