Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 2 June 2020
Special Committee on Covid-19 Response
Travel Restrictions
Mr. Niall Burgess:
The public advice here would need to evolve to a point where we were not advising people against travel off the island. That is the first criteria. The second factor we would look at is the public health situation in the country where people were planning travelling to. A third factor would be a sense of the safety of international travel. Essentially we are talking about a situation that is unprecedented and rapidly evolving. In the first three months of last year, we updated our travel advice on 130 occasions for different countries. In the first three months of this year we updated our travel advice 1,300 times. This is a tenfold increase and is because of the speed at which a local public health situation was evolving. It can evolve very rapidly. One can have a situation where the authorities in the Republic of Korea open up to international travel and then a few days later they impose restrictions around Seoul. It is very difficult to imagine a stable situation in the coming months where we will be able to give travel advice with a degree of assurance.
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