Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

To go over this again, I will answer Deputy O’Rourke’s question directly. A number of labs have engaged with us. So far, 25 different testing services have contacted us to seek permission to issue digital Covid certificates. Three of those have been accepted in full so far. Seven are partially accepted. That is the progress so far with those labs and testing services. A person will go to his or her testing service for a PCR or antigen test. The service will verify the person’s identity, which is an important part of its job. The service has to carry out the test with a trained professional. It has to comply with the standard operating procedure, SOP, that was written by the Department of Health to satisfy the Government that it meets the technical and medical standards required. As well as this, it have to satisfy the Government that it will not, for example, issue certificates with the wrong name on them, and so on. At that point, it will be empowered to connect to our servers. It can issue a generated QR code for each person, as he or she receives his or her negative test. It can then issue the digital Covid certificate to the recipient. The rules of the digital Covid certificate scheme say the PCR test must be carried out within 72 hours of arrival at the destination. The testing services will, therefore, only be useful three days before 19 July 2021. For an antigen test, the test must be 48 hours before arrival. It will, therefore, only be this weekend that the testing services will issue the first digital Covid certificates. Over the previous months, we have tested a number of pilot testing services to make sure that they can generate these digital Covid certificates, and that all is working. I am, therefore, confident that there will be no problem.