Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We are dealing with two things. The first is the pre-flight testing. The Minister of State referred to a date of 8 November. That applies to people coming here from another state. I assume there is no facility decided on for that period whereby we would carry out the same sort of operation. I have a specific question. Obviously we have the Health Information and Quality Authority report, which does not exactly endorse anything as regards rapid testing at this point.

About two weeks ago the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, spoke about a pilot project where rapid testing is being carried out in parallel with PCR testing, which is the gold standard, but I have not heard any other mention of this. I am just looking for clarity on this. I think antigen testing and possibly loop-mediated isothermal amplification, LAMP, were the two methods he spoke about. Is there any information on that? I am really talking about what the timeline is and how we can validate this, given that what NPHET has from HIQA is not exactly a tick box. This is accepting that PCR will remain the gold standard. Where flight testing is concerned, we do not want it to take capacity away from community testing, particularly given the problems we have at the moment.