A Government minister has admitted it will take some time to give Gardaí new powers to enforce COVID-19 restrictions.

Plans to hand Gardaí powers to shut down house parties or pubs that are flouting the guidelines were announced alongside a range of new measures last night.

The Attorney General has been asked to draft the new laws; however, they will need Parliamentary approval and the Dáil is not due to sit again until September 15th.

On The Pat Kenny Show this morning, the Agriculture Minister Dara Calleary said the new laws must be above legal challenge.

“There are constitutional protections around houses and around private property and those have to be dealt with,” he said.

“I would like to see those powers available but I want to see them available in a way that can’t be challenged.

“When they are available, they need to be robust and that is the work that is underway with the Attorney General and Minister McEntee at the moment.”

Minister for Agriculture Dara Calleary arrives at Dublin Castle for a cabinet meeting.

He said the new legislation is a “priority” for Government in the coming days.

“The Gardaí do have some limited powers,” he said. “They can use some pubic order offences.

“But we are in the middle of a pandemic. Should they need to use those powers? That is why we have had to restrict the numbers of people going to houses – because of the issues with house parties and the number of clusters associated with house parties over the last number of weeks.”

Restaurants

Minister Calleary noted that the power to close pubs should only be necessary for a tiny minority flouting the guidelines.

“The very vast majority of those that are lucky enough to be open are complying and are doing their level best,” he said.

“What we saw over the weekend was a very small minority and that is the kind of thing we are trying to stamp out.

“You didn’t see the 95% of other restaurants and bars serving food that are operating within the guidelines and operating incredibly safely.”

Meat factories

Around 40% of the clusters identified in the last two weeks were “directly or very closely related” to clusters in meat factories and Direct Provision centres and officials say others around the country may have been seeded by those.

Minister Calleary said his department was working with “various different agencies” to improve conditions in meat plants and insisted officials were working to tackle the situation.

Testing and tracing

He said Ireland was now dealing with the fourth-highest coronavirus growth rate in Europe and said the new restrictions aim to get us ahead of the latest clusters.

He blamed recent contact tracing delays on an increased number of contacts among people who test positive.

“One of the delays in terms of the contact racing has been identified as that those people who are testing positive have a lot more contacts than previously people who tested positive had,” he said.

“So, it is taking a lot more time to ring people, to contact people, to notify people that they have been in close contact.”

He said the country would be living with targeted restrictions for another 12 months, until a vaccine becomes available.