Ms Elizabeth Canavan:

I thank the Deputy for his question and for his kind remarks and I have to say that much of the heavy lifting is done outside of my particular Department. I very much want to commend colleagues, as this has been a fairly stunning performance which I also want to clearly state.

As to the call centre, for the moment we have tried to provide and base the full call centre for 19 July on what we understand to be the proportion of people who are planning to travel and on booking information in that regard. We have some made some calculations as to what the level of demand might be but we will obviously have to keep that under review and we are aware of that.

I do not have the helpline times off the top of my head. It is not from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. but it is not 6 a.m. to midnight either and is somewhere in the middle, if memory serves me correctly. We are also looking at trying to have some surge capacity particularly in the first number of weeks of this to try to capture that. We will have to respond when we see how things are actually panning out. We want to be able to provide people with a level of reassurance.We are also going to greatly encourage people to look at the website, which we will be continuously updating with information in real-time based on the calls that we are getting to ensure that we get as much information out there as possible.We anticipate that much of the information that people need can actually be dealt with on the website.

In the very short term, in respect of the emergency phone line, we are really focusing on requests where we expect people to be ringing up looking for their certificates. They will only be receiving assurances at this stage that the certificates are en route.We will check for urgency and we will log urgent requests but we will not be able to process any requests or offer to cover them until 19 July when the full call centre will be up and running. We will try to capture errors on certificates and any calls that require resolution that we cannot resolve until the full call centre is set up will be held, processed, logged and ready for processing on 19 July. We ask people to have patience over the next number of days so that they are not ringing up and clogging up that line for people who may have urgent travel requirements.

On the US and proofs, we covered a little bit of this ground earlier. There are variations in what people are bringing in from the US but for the purposes, for example, of mandatory hotel quarantine and certain proofs of vaccinated persons have been accepted. I am not certain if Mr O’Connor can add much more information to this question at this stage.