Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There is a need to advise people of what the state is in countries. Some other countries are in a much worse situation. Overall, we are saying that the safest thing to do is to stay at home and take a holiday in Ireland this year. That, to me, is fairly basic and fairly sensible. We have a very restrictive travel regime at the moment in terms of our advice. It is very restrictive and travel is on the floor. The next stage is that we will be putting in place a call centre and the electronic locator form. Contact tracing is key and there will be randomised testing at airports. We are exploring the issue of areas where there is a high incidence of Covid-19 to see how we can further protect our citizens from any potential dangers of people travelling here from such locations and how best to deal with that, both legally and sensibly, in terms of protecting life.

People should remember when they talk about travel from certain areas that there have been some very tough stories in terms of families who cannot get back from particular countries. Travel is not all about tourism. That is an important point. In Europe, for example, they have had various advisories but they have never banned an aeroplane from landing anywhere. Nor have we, and there is a reason for that in terms of workers, family members and so on. We have Irish people who work in Europe and may want to get home for two or three weeks. Some of them are working on behalf of the State. Should our message to those workers be that when they come back, they will have to quarantine mandatorily? They will have to restrict their movements if they are coming from countries outside the list, but we just need a bit of balance in our debate about this. I gave figures earlier which show that travel is on the floor compared with where it was a year ago. That does not take away the dangers of Covid-19 through travel. I work with and talk to the acting Chief Medical Officer. I have great respect for him and I will continue to work with him on this. Cabinet has to take a wider breadth of issues on board when it makes these decisions.

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