Ryanair has called for the Government to commit to the EU's plan for air travel and to lift "the 'North Korea' travel restrictions" here.
Ireland is expected to be one of the countries to sign up to the EU Commission's COVID aviation plan, which will be revealed next week.
Meanwhile, the "Living with COVID" roadmap for the next few months is due to be unveiled here on Tuesday.
In a statement today, Ryanair said Ireland has "suffered under NPHET’s mismanagement of the Green List" since July 1st.
It said that NPHET "masquerade as 'experts' but are in fact a group of Department of Health Civil Servants".
They have "terrified the Irish Government into imposing Europe’s tightest air travel restrictions" which effectively prevented people from travelling to other EU countries which have lower rates of COVID than here, including the UK and Germany.
The statement added: "This failed Green List is the latest example of NPHET’s mismanagement coming on top of their failure to protect the nursing homes, meat factories, their delay in mandating face masks and their failure to implement an effective test and trace system in Ireland."
The airline said that the country's aviation and tourism sectors "are being devastated" by Department of Health "mismanagement" and NPHET "incompetence".
'NPHET mismanagement'
A Ryanair spokesperson said: “After months of NPHET mismanagement of face masks, and travel restrictions, these EU Commission proposals are proportionate, sensible and reflect the successful policies followed by EU States like Germany and Italy, who allowed safe intra-EU air travel since 1 July, but have maintained significantly lower Covid case rates than NPHET has managed here in Ireland, despite restricting air travel like North Korea."
They added: "Ryanair calls on the Irish Government to ignore the mismanagement by NPHET of international air travel and immediately adopt these sensible and practical EU Commission proposals.
"NPHET have mismanaged the reopening of the Irish economy, and they have spectacularly mismanaged Ireland’s Green List, which has continued to lock down Ireland – like North Korea – since July when many other EU States have allowed safe intra-EU air travel, but maintained significantly lower COVID case rates than Ireland, due to their superior test and tracing systems.
"It is time to end NPHET’s mismanagement and for Micheál Martin’s Government to lead the resumption of EU air travel, and promote some modest recovery of the Irish economy this winter.”
