Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will start and will then ask Dr. Glynn to come in on the rationale for counties and not smaller areas. It is a very fair question. In my own county, for example, there is a very similar situation. We have a very high prevalence in the north of the county and a very low prevalence in the south and west of the county. People are understandably asking if we can do it by town, village or electoral district. There is no right answer to this. There are good reasons which Dr. Glynn will go into. If I can just draw the Deputy back to Kildare, Laois and Offaly, when the measures were introduced in those counties a lot of people very understandably made exactly these arguments. In Kildare, for example, people were saying it was not in the north east where there is a very close connection with Dublin and asking if the restrictions could be more localised. People in Laois were saying the meat processing plants were not there. NPHET's recommendation to Government was for the counties, for many of the reasons Dr. Glynn can go into but partly because while people may have worked in the meat processing plants, they were living and socialising and mixing right across the three counties. Similarly, in the north east of Kildare right now, in that electoral district the incidence rate per 100,000 of population is now north of 300. What worked at the time was that thanks to the efforts of the people in those communities, the rates did come down although they actually went up right across the other side of the Dublin border. It is very frustrating. I would just say to the Deputy that the evidence we have from the work of Kildare, Laois and Offaly and the efforts those communities made, shows that the county-by-county approach, while it can be very frustrating, has worked.