Dr. Niamh Power:

To conduct a pilot programme, we would first need to decide what we wanted to find out from it. The Department of Health, the HSE or whoever else might wish to tell us that, but as regards the logistics of carrying out tests for a flight, I could do that this afternoon if needs be.

It is that quick. We really can scale it up that quickly.

On Deputy Ó Murchú's point about post-arrival screening, that probably depends on the risk in the country the arrivals are coming from. For a country that has to undergo mandatory hotel quarantine at the moment, such as India, because of variants of concern, then, rather than the Department of Health or whoever deciding we need quarantine, we can replace that with serial testing. For EU countries without a particular risk, I do not see why we should quarantine. The ethos of the digital Covid certificate is that countries of an equal or lesser risk to us should not be subject to quarantine.