Hildegarde Naughton (Galway West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As the Deputy knows, a suite of supports was announced at the outset of the pandemic, which I outlined to the committee, so he is very well aware of them - the temporary wage subsidy scheme, the commercial rates waivers, and access to liquidity funding through the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, ISIF. In the 2021 budget we allocated €21.3 million to our regional airports along with the €10 million the Deputy mentioned, which is capital funding.

Airports will be asked to make applications to the Department for that capital funding. Obviously, we have put supports in place for the workers who have been severely affected by the news of Ryanair pulling its bases from Cork and Shannon airports. I have been in discussions with the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection, Deputy Humphreys, about contacting the local welfare offices as well. It is important to say that.

As the committee knows, at the Cabinet meeting on Tuesday we agreed to align ourselves with the EU traffic light system. We had an agreement at Cabinet this week on that approach and we will be coming back on it. There will be a high-level technical group within Departments monitoring it every two weeks. From midnight tonight, there will be no restrictions for travellers from a green list country travelling to Ireland. Many countries across Europe, including us, are on a red list. For orange and red list countries, we are asking people to restrict their movements for 14 days, as is currently the case for all travellers. For orange list countries, there will be an exemption from restricting movements if the person carries out a validated pre-departure test. The requirement for red list countries remains as it is at the moment and people will have to restrict their movements.

The high-level technical group will be looking at and assessing the types of testing we can carry out. As we know, the polymerase chain reaction, PCR, test is the gold standard. There is also work ongoing on other potential types of testing that could become available or be validated in the future. We want to leave that open in order that we could potentially use that for pre-departure tests.