Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We have to take everything into perspective. Ms Considine will be familiar with some of the geography I talk about but if one lives in Tulla, as I do, and somebody else is living in Lissycasey in west County Clare, there are more than 5 km between us. At the moment we are being told we cannot travel between those two locations so there is that difficulty with saying we should open up the air routes because that is what the sector wants. One must balance public opinion and public acceptance of the restrictions which they are being asked to undertake as well. I feel we should be at level 3 and not level 5 but that is a moot point now, and we have moved on from that. There would be very considerable resistance among the public if a person had an issue going from Tulla to Lissycasey because it is outside the 5 km radius but could toddle down to the airport and head off to Spain for a week's holidays. While Mr. Philips is putting forward a very good case for the next phase of recovery, and we should be doing the work now to understand what that framework should look like, in the current climate one could not run the two systems in parallel.