Professor Anthony Staines:

The question on what is essential travel is very difficult to answer. There are lots of edge cases and there are many people who have a good reason in their own minds for travelling. Others, however, might not feel that it is a good reason. From a practical perspective, the person will make the decision anyway because he or she is the person who decides to travel or not. By placing the responsibility squarely on the person and saying "If you feel you need to travel then that is your choice but you must be willing to justify it", we are pushing back responsibility to the community. We are saying to people that we trust them to make reasonable decisions. Not everyone makes reasonable decisions. Again, this is imperfect, but the alternative is having a kind of "Is your voyage necessary?" checklist and some kind of travel-monitoring police at the airports and county boundaries.

That is not very practical either. It is about getting people to think about why they want or need to travel. Sometimes they will make the decision that they do need to travel, and sometimes they will not. There are peculiar issues, such as the town of Blessington, for example. It is in Wicklow but part of it is in Kildare. Does that mean that the people who live in the few streets in Blessington that are in Kildare have to go to Newbridge to shop, or can they go 100 yd down the road and shop in Blessington? Clearly, they will do the latter. We are telling them to think about it before they go.