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

I thank the Deputy for her questions. The passenger locator form has been in place for many months, as she knows. It has not worked out to be as robust a measure as was needed. That is why the Government made changes in recent weeks in response to the fact that we are now concerned about new variants entering the country from other parts of the world. Now, anybody who is entering the State by air or by sea, with the exception of supply chain workers, hauliers, pilots and cabin crew, for example, has to have a PCR test. People have to have had a PCR test within 72 hours of arriving in the country and they have to produce evidence of it. There is a very high degree of compliance when it comes to that. It is working very well. I know it is not 100% in terms of stopping the virus coming into the country but it is working very well and it is mandatory. There are fines and files have been sent by the Garda to the DPP for people who have arrived without evidence of a negative test.

The number of people travelling in and out of the country now is very low. It is down to about 33,000 people a week, but that is people who are travelling for essential reasons. Quarantining that many people for 14 days in a hotel with closed windows would be 66,000 people. These are people who generally are involved in essential travel, for example, people coming back for a funeral or maybe seeing a dying relative, a supply chain worker or a crucial worker who has come to fix a machine in a hospital, for example. This is essential travel and we need to make sure we do not cut off essential travel entirely because sometimes it is necessary.

In terms of anything we might do in the future, we need to bear in mind three things: our citizens' rights - our EU rights as EU citizens; proportionality; and the situation with regard to Northern Ireland. First, on proportionality, at the moment if somebody tests positive for Covid in Ireland, we do not detain them. We do not put them in a hotel with security guards. If we were to take people who have come in from overseas - Irish people returning home; citizens coming back from overseas who have a negative test for Covid - and detain them in a hotel for 14 days, that would be disproportionate because there are lots of people in Ireland who we know have tested positive for Covid and we do not seek to detain them. Unfortunately, some of them do not self-isolate when they are supposed to. We would have to consider the proportionality of it.

The next issue is citizens' rights. We are EU citizens, there is freedom of movement and we have the right to travel, study and work anywhere in the European Union. That can only be constrained in very particular circumstances.

Then there is the obvious issue of Northern Ireland. A zero Covid policy and a very strict 14-day border quarantine might make sense in a country that can control its borders. We cannot do so in the same way because of the open land border with Northern Ireland, which we do not want to close. If the UK, as has been suggested - although I understand that those suggestions are not advanced - were to bring in border quarantine, we might be able to do something on a two-island basis, but it is not going to work on a two-thirds-of-an-island basis.

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