The DAA is insisting that the Chief Medical Officer’s warning against international travel is not backed up by the HSEs own data.

Dr Tony Holohan last night said that the risks related to non-essential travel outside the country are “simply too high at this moment.”

He said health officials had yet to give any specific consideration to family members hoping to return home for Christmas.

At the Oireachtas Transport Committee this morning, the DAA, Ryanair and Aer Lingus all called on the Government to immediately implement the EU Traffic Light System in full.

They also called for a coronavirus rapid testing system to be approved for Irish airports.

DAA Chief Executive Dalton Philips speaking at the DAA 2018 Annual Results, 30-04-2019. Image: Sasko Lazarov/RollingNews

On The Hard Shoulder this evening, DAA Chief Executive Dalton Philips said only a tiny proportion of Ireland COVID-19 cases have been linked to international travel.

“There is obviously a balance between the health needs and the economic needs of the country but if you look at all positive COVID cases that are attributed to foreign travel it is less than 2% and if you look at recent weeks, it has been less than 0.5% of all cases,” he said.

“So, it is a handful of people and at the moment, the country is literally being shut down.”

Asked about Dr Holohan’s comments, he said: “The data does not support the risk.”

“If you look at the HSE’s own information that comes out daily, the incidence of positive cases attributed to foreign travel on any 14-day average, they are usually somewhere below 20,” he said.

“Twenty cases and in the last two weeks we have had the population Galway and Dundalk, so over 120,000 people, coming in and out of the country and only 20 cases are attributed to that.”

Traffic light

Mr Dalton said the new traffic light system will come into effect in Ireland in early-November; however, he warned that without a “rapid, scalable and accurate way of testing people coming into this country” the system will not work.

He noted that the big decisions that need to be made are whether the tests should be carried out pre-departure or post-arrival and whether the tests should be antigen or PCR.

The PCR tests would cost €90 per passenger while the antigen tests would cost between €5 and €6 per person.

“The scientific community seems to be rallying around antigen testing as a very scalable and affordable way of testing and opening up countries and we, in Ireland, are being left behind and that is putting the country in a critical state,” he said.

“Because this is not about the aviation sector, which by the way is getting decimated, this is about opening the country up.”

International travel

He said people all over Europe need clarity on what they need to do should they wish to travel to or from Ireland in the coming months.

“We can’t just let the days go by,” he said. “We were in front of the Oireachtas in July talking about having clarity around pre-departure testing and we are now in October.”