Mr. Kenneth Spratt:

We are guided by public health advice and guidance from NPHET and colleagues at the Department of Health. It is important to remember that travel into the country is significantly reduced. The numbers speak for themselves. We are down significantly in aviation travel and maritime travel. As regards what we have in place, we have the passenger locator form, which will move to an electronic form very soon, and follow-up questioning from colleagues in the border management unit. We acknowledge that has not been as effective as we would like it to be, which is why we are setting up a call centre that will follow up on all the passenger locator forms completed by people who come into the country. We are moving to an electronic version of the form, which the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer is developing as we speak. Although travel into the country is significantly reduced by normal standards, that should enable us to follow up with people in a much more rigorous and robust way.

Regarding the self-declaratory nature of the protocols, when we started to reopen society and the economy, we introduced the roadmap for reopening. Like many of the approaches we have taken to dealing with Covid, that has been based on engaging with people, explaining things to them and encouraging them to abide by the public health guidance, advice, regulations and instructions that have been put in place by the Government. That has worked very well across a number of areas and we believe the self-declaratory approach is working quite well when it comes to air and marine travel. As we understand it, the incidence of contagion is zero on the marine side. We have no evidence of any case having been contracted during travel into the country. Similarly, we have not been alerted to the protocols not working when it comes to air travel.

As regards there not being checks, controls or diagnostics by third parties, we try to engage, explain and encourage people, and we seek to steer clear from enforcement, as best we can, unless it absolutely needs to be done. Mr. Towey may want to add something on temperature screening and DNA testing. We believe more could be done. We are giving consideration to introducing departure point testing, but some testing is in place in Dublin Airport for people who present with symptoms. We are considering what additional measures we could, and perhaps should, introduce.