An associate professor of biochemistry says he cannot understand why pubs are being allowed re-open.
So-called 'wet pubs' - those not serving food - are to be allowed to re-open their doors on September 21st.
Government ministers have been meeting on Tuesday to discuss the impact of opening pubs in two weeks' time under strict new rules.
Dr Tomás Ryan is from the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College Dublin.
He told Pat Kenny: "I can't understand why we're opening the pubs so soon after opening all the schools and at the same time as opening all of the colleges and universities.
"It's an awful lot of things to be doing at the same time, when cases are steadily increasing.
"It does make sense that we're being asked to reduce contacts - because asking us to reduce contacts is one way to reduce the overall 'R' number.
"It's not clear that it's going to be effective - and because there are many things going on at the same time, it's going to be very difficult to know what things are having an effect - if any".
"I don't see the logic of opening up pubs at the same time as schools, at the same time as universities.
"Why didn't we just open up everything in June/July? The reason we didn't is because we wanted to see in June and July could we keep things under control, we wanted to learn.
"We have since then learned that we're not keeping things under control - and the reaction to that seems to be, from many elements of Government and lobby groups, 'well then just open everything up anyway'".
"I don't know what's going on in Dublin and in Limerick, but clearly cases are rising.
"The good news is that we have the stop-gap measure of local lockdowns - which we don't want to use - but they work very well in Ireland: evidence of this is Kildare, Laois and Offaly.
"We've also had increased restrictions a few weeks ago for the whole country, it's not clear that that's had an effect.
"If it has had an effect, there's been counteracting things going on because we're not seeing a reduction in our overall rate of change.
"We're seeing greater numbers of cases amongst the older people in the population, which is worrying, because the fatality rate is starting to rise again in Spain - which is obviously a good few weeks ahead of us - and our own hospital admissions are rising, which means in a few weeks our ICU admission will be rising".
On any local lockdown, he said: "I don't know what the Government is thinking with respect to zoning in the greater Dublin area.
"There's no reason that regions need to be whole counties or sub-counties: a lockdown of all of Cork county would never really make sense - bigger counties you need to divide them up.
"And similarly with urban-rural divides, and large metropolitan areas, there's a case to made for more subtle subdivisions - but only if you have cooperation with the population, and when pubs are opening that's going to be challenging".
Dr Ryan added: "I think we run into battles that nobody can win when we start pitting sectors of society against each other - pubs vs schools, airlines vs other sectors of society - for the whole country, no one is ever going to be happy and the measures are probably not going to be that effective.
"What would be more sensible is regional approaches - so instead of thinking 'do we open pubs or do we open schools', what you do is you consider a particular county.
"And the county in itself is responsible - obviously with the support of the State - for getting community transmission low and stable.
"And if you have low community transmission in a given county, the the rationale would be all pubs, all schools, everything in that county can open up".
