Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said the Government is determined to take measures to avoid a fresh lockdown over Covid-19 but “the danger and challenge is always there”.
Speaking to reporters in Limerick on Thursday, Mr Martin said the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) “have given us advice which we have adopted and we’ve implemented, and obviously the way the numbers are going, NPHET are constantly wary of that [lockdown] prospect, and the reason we adopted the measures last week was to make sure we don’t get to that situation, but it’s fluid.”
Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly told an Oireachtas committee on Wednesday the State was at a “tipping point”, and that the coronavirus pandemic is “close to having us lock down the country again”.
Asked about Mr Donnelly’s comments, the Taoiseach said: “The big story this week is the reopening of our schools – a million people between students and teachers coming back into our schools.
“We have been visiting schools to see the extraordinary work of teachers, SNAs, and school managements, really good to see the contribution they have made to enabling children return to school.
“Our strategy is to live with Covid-19, to protect jobs, particularly manufacturing facilities like the one we visited this morning – to get our schools open again; and to resume our health services. And, by taking the measures we have taken, we want to try and avoid the lockdown, but the danger and challenge is always there.”
Mr Martin was speaking in Limerick at the announcement of 400 jobs at US pharmaceutical firm Regeneron.
Speaking at the Oireachtas committee on Covid-19, Mr Donnelly said that if public health advice is followed, schools and businesses can remain open and the virus can be suppressed.
However, he said: “the reality is we are dealing with a virus that is close to having us lock down the country again. The public health advice is that we are at a tipping point and we are doing everything we can to suppress this virus to stop a second lockdown”.
He said that if a second lockdown were to happen, healthcare services will be “severely curtailed”. Currently, the strategy is to use “targeted measures to suppress the virus while keeping as much of our society and our economy open as possible”. He argued that the experiences of Kildare, Laois, and Offaly showed that suppressing the virus through this strategy was possible.
He warned, however: “If there is a second wave the Government will have to consider the blunt instrument which we know works, that is, a lockdown. We are doing everything we can to avoid that.”
In Northern Ireland, one more person with coronavirus has died, bringing the total number of fatalities recorded by the North’s department of health to 560.
A total of 69 new cases of Covid-19 have been identified in the North in the last 24 hours, bringing the number of confirmed cases in Northern Ireland since the pandemic began to 6,964.
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