Mr. Paul Reid:

I thank the Deputy. I just want to give a very quick response to Deputy Carthy. A total of 3,000 tests were completed last week across 29 plants and I apologise for the delay in getting back to him on that.

I thank Deputy McAuliffe for his comments. I will, if I may, make a point just to reassure the public. I have never advocated that we have the absolute optimum testing and tracing system. We need to build and evolve what we have and that is a discussion we have had with our board about building a future model and that is what we are doing as part of our plans. The facts are that, including just up to yesterday, some world data reports that we rank among some of the highest countries per 1,000 head of population. We rank in the top quartile for tests per 1,000 people versus GDP per capita. As such we are performing but we know we could do more with our testing and tracing system.

Second, on known clusters and testing centres, we work very closely with NPHET where high prominence and incidence of cases emerge and we are open to whatever solutions we can do. We have put in mobile testing units, as I briefly mentioned, in other areas and we are continually monitoring the areas the Deputy mentioned.

Third, in terms of travel and testing, it is ultimately the responsibility of the Department of Transport, which is working on this right now. We want to ensure two things, namely, that we continuously have the capacity we need for community testing, serial testing and contacts testing and, regarding other capacity that comes on board, we need to make sure we do not impact on referrals of cases. That process is ongoing right now and we are advising the Department on it to ensure two things. First, if extra capacity is required for travel, it is secured and second, that if the extra capacity process comes on board for travel, there is a process in legislation for notification of positive results to our HSE system.