Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On the meat plants, we very much acknowledge they are high risk environments. It is to do with the temperature, the airflow and so on and that is why there is a surveillance programme of testing in meat plants. Thankfully, the percentage of results coming back positive has so far been very small.

On international travel, I confess I am not across things as much in the past few days as I should be but this is an issue the Minister, Deputy Ryan, is leading on. I understand we are very much advising people that we are in a level 5 period. Under level 5 restrictions a person is not supposed to go more that 5 km from his or her home, except for work, education or compassionate reasons such as caring for a relative. That applies to international travel too, so if people are travelling internationally it should only be for work, education or a compassionate reason which may involve, for example, having to care for a relative.

We have adopted the European traffic light system whereby once a week the European Centre for Disease Control, ECDC, produces a green, red and orange map of all the different regions of Europe - it is done by region rather than country - and that determines the rules around foreign travel. We are in level 5 but there is no requirement to quarantine or test for travel into Ireland from a green area. As I understand it, people travelling from an amber area can avoid the 14-day restricted movements requirement if they have a prior negative polymerase chain reaction, PCR, test. People travelling from a red area must restrict their movements for at least five days and then have a negative PCR test at that point. The whole idea of bringing in testing related to travel from amber and red areas is to reduce the risk of the virus being reseeded into the country. That is going to be particularly important given that as we get the numbers down the risk of reseeding becomes higher and we want to avoid that.

At the moment we are up to 120,000 tests per week. This compares very favourably other countries. Of 23 western European countries, we rank eighth out of 23. We are ahead of places like Germany or New Zealand. We are behind Denmark, which is doing a lot more testing than we are but now has a higher incidence of the virus than we do. That indicates that it is not all about testing, although testing is extremely important.

On contact tracing we are trying to ensure that is up to a higher level at the end of level 5. We are trying to use level 5 to put in place even more robust testing and contact tracing regimes than we had before. Testing is going extremely well. We have the capacity to test 120,000 per week. We are really trying to scale up the number of people working in the tracing centres. I am told there are 650 people working in the tracing centres at the moment, of whom 344 are new recruits. The rest are staff redeployed from other areas.

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