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

Deputy O'Callaghan makes some very valid points but there is one thing we need to bear in mind. It is not so much the outlet that causes the virus to spread. It is not that shoe shops are higher risk than a newsagent or whatever outlet one wants to pick. The difficulty is that the more we allow to open, the more interactions there will be. It is not that the person may necessarily pick up the virus in the shoe shop from another customer or the sales assistant. It is that such people go into town, meet somebody at the bus stop, meet other people on the bus, may stop for a coffee, go in, buy shoes and then go home on the bus and do the same thing again. Cutting out certain activities and preventing people from mixing and mingling reduces the number of potential interactions. I am not sure if that makes any sense but in terms of closing that particular set of stores or that particular type of hospitality business, it is not just the interaction that happens in that business; it is the ten in the entire journey. The whole science, to the extent that it is a science although it is not an exact science, is to reduce the number of opportunities people have to mix, meet other people and thereby transmit the virus.

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