An infectious disease expert says Ireland needs to drive down the number of daily coronavirus cases so the country can be in a 'stable' place.
Professor Sam McConkey is head of the department of international health and tropical medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI).
He says the outbreak could only be called 'stable' here if we were seeing under 10 cases a day.
"So I'd like to see that we get down to a really stable place of tiny numbers - let's say single digit numbers in our country - because then it's possible to keep it down for many, many months with traditional outbreak investigation, contact tracing and public health support and expertise.
"Whereas it's very unstable as we've seen - in early December the numbers were around 200 or 300 - but that's not a stable place to sit at at all, it just rapidly jumps up".
He has also warned that Ireland's third wave of the virus is 'clearly bigger than the second'.
It comes after officials announced a new record number of cases of 1,296, and six more related deaths, on St Stephen's Day.
Professor McConkey says we need to double down on a national effort to drive the virus out.
"Everyone starting to feel that optimism and hope of the coronavirus vaccine coming - that's all great, this turning is happening.
"But I think at the same time as all that, we are in the middle of a very brisk third wave that's clearly bigger than the second wave.
"It's clearly worse than we were back in October, so we do need this cohesive action again".
