Dr. Tony Holohan:

I will come in on that point. We have not had a specific discussion on that. I take it the Deputy is implying the idea that we would advocate that Irish people would be exempted from the restrictions that the United States has in place in terms of its own travel arrangements. No, we have not done that. What we continue to do is to co-operate in line with all of the European agreements in regard to travel. In broad terms, travel has gone well in this country. When I say that, I am talking about the provisions that were put in place specifically to try to mitigate and manage down, as much as we reasonably could, the level of importation of the virus. We had mandatory hotel quarantine arrangements in place and, as the Deputy is aware, we provide ongoing advice to the Minister based on an ongoing assessment. That now relies on the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control assessment around threats coming from other European countries, as well as what we call annex one countries, or countries that we regard as having low enough incidence for us to consider them as being equivalent, or we could look at it in those terms, in order to make those assessments as to which of those countries should be the subject of mandatory hotel quarantine or any other provisions in regard to international travel. We think our reliance on that as a measure will decrease over time, which should be good news because, in broad terms, much of the world is now experiencing the same. Whatever about the level of incidence, that incidence is being driven by the same variant that we are currently dealing with, and that has had an effect in terms of the nature and the relative import of different regimes in different countries at a different point.

We are always going to have to be mindful, as we travel individually, of what we can then do to both assess the risks that we subject ourselves to or are going to be exposed to, and how we can best then try to prevent those. The airlines have done a great job in terms of trying to ensure that the process of travel - in other words, transmission while people are travelling - is minimised as much as possible and then, beyond that, it is for the individual to make the assessments in terms of social, business or other engagements they have, in the same way they should do if they were at home.

In broad terms, Europe is experiencing a significant challenge in terms of the level of infection that it is experiencing. We experienced it in western Europe maybe ahead of other parts of the rest of Europe but we think that, heretofore, those arrangements that we had in place to try to minimise the importation of the disease had an important role to play and will continue to heighten and maintain high levels of understanding on the part of the public around the risks that arise to them as they travel internationally in regard to this disease.