Professor Mark Ferguson:

That is a very good idea. The Deputy's suggestion of doing it on an Ireland-UK route is particularly helpful, because as I said previously, the UK is piloting these things and has got the IT systems in place. If an airline on that route is picked, such as CityJet, Ryanair, Aer Lingus or whatever, this system could be used as a substitute for home self-quarantining, for example. The data would need to be collected, it would need to be seen that people did the test, reported the results and information was received on how many people did that and so on. The Deputy's idea is a very good one. If that was done, there are quite a lot of businesspeople travelling at the present time, and others who, I suspect, would volunteer to participate, particularly if they did not have to home isolate but would be allowed to go about their business. This is unless, of course, there was a positive test, in which case it would be necessary to isolate and get a confirmatory PCR. The Deputy's idea is a good one.