Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

That is a good question. To an extent, Ireland and the rest of the world will have to wait and see. The strategy right now is to put in place very robust controls around international travel. Even before hotel quarantining is introduced, the measures we have in place will put us at the forefront of the EU. When we introduce hotel quarantining, which will be here very soon as the legislation passed through the Seanad last night, we will have, by quite a stretch, the most robust quarantining and international travel measures anywhere in the EU, very much in line with the UK. That is one part of the strategy. At the same time, we need to continue aggressively suppressing the virus here. Very good progress has been made, thanks to people sticking with level 5. We got good, heartening evidence from the ESRI to the effect that while people have been finding it really tough, they have understood that we absolutely must keep going.

If the vaccines are delivered from April onwards, we will be able to administer in excess of 1 million doses per month. If the supplies come in, it will have a big effect on case numbers in Ireland. The chief clinical officer in the HSE gave figures some days ago indicating that the Covid infection rate among hospital staff had reduced by 95%, which must be partly due to the vaccines. The big unknown is the variants. What happens with variants around the world, their characteristics, the question of whether they are resistant or partially resistant to the vaccines, and their level of severity will influence, to an extent, the border controls we will have to keep in place.