Dr. Tomás Ryan:

Obviously the opening of third level institutions more or less coinciding with the reopening of what we call wet pubs in much of the country and the recent reopening of schools is going to pose a lot of challenges for how we manage the disease in the country. I have a conflict of interest in that I am a professional in a third level institution so everything I say on this must be taken in that context. We had a successful move to online education at the beginning of the pandemic. We know that many universities in Ireland, including Trinity College Dublin, are focusing on a blended model as much as possible and are reducing student contact. There will not be any large lectures. There is planning for lectures involving smaller numbers and this will be reviewed as we go along.

A major challenge from the Irish perspective with respect to universities is that most of our students do not live on campus which is different from many other countries. There is also a tendency for all of our students to go to their home counties at the weekends. This does seem to pose very significant challenges to any regionalised strategy that we would have in Ireland on a county by county basis.

That is my primary concern about how universities will effect how the Government plan works regardless of the end strategy or goal.

I think moving towards blanket testing in universities may help deal with this. There are some efforts towards doing this on a pilot basis at Trinity College Dublin but that will not be a panacea for the challenges we face.