‘Green list’ to remain until Covid-19 roadmap unveiled mid-September

Ireland's travel "green list" will not be updated until the Government's medium-term plan for living with Covid-19 has been published, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar has said.

On Monday, Mr Varadkar , with more detailed promised in the new roadmap set to be published later this month.

“The green list won’t be updated until then,” the Minister for Business said, while launching the State’s €2 billion credit guarantee scheme on Monday.

The list has now not been updated in more than a month despite the Government initially promising it would be done every two weeks. Were the green list to be updated based on the methodology used when it was first drawn up, many more countries would be eligible for travel without a two-week quarantine period being asked of those returning from those locations.

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Membership of the list is determined by the 14-day incidence rate per 100,000 population of Covid-19. Due to the growth of the virus in Ireland in recent weeks, many countries originally not included on the list would become eligible, including the UK, if the same calculation was used. However, last week, Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said it would be "perverse" to update the green list on this basis.

Travel and testing

Mr Varadkar also signalled that Ireland could opt into wider European plans for a "traffic light" system to determine travel locations, which was flagged by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen last week, and is currently being worked on by the European Centre for Disease Control.

“That’s something we can opt into and that’s going to be part of our considerations,” the Tánaiste said. It is expected the new roadmap will contain updates on travel and testing policy, with officials reviewing options such as testing at airports, or requiring those arriving in the country to obtain a negative test before travelling to the country.

Mr Varadkar said of the new roadmap: “It won’t be as straightforward as the existing roadmap, but it is going to give people the certainty and the horizon they can plan against.”

However, the Opposition criticised the Government’s travel policy, with Social Democrats co-leader Róisín Shortall saying it is “impossible” to know what it is.

‘Musing in the media’

“We’ve heard nothing about what’s actually happening at our ports and airports since mid-July and at that stage the so-called monitoring was completely ineffective,” she said. “We have four different Ministers – Coveney, Donnelly, Ryan and McEntee – musing in the media about what might be done. There is no coherence to it and some of it is contradictory,” she said.

“We need a testing system that is reliable and which gives the public the confidence that the Government is taking the issue seriously.”

Amid a general increase in the number of Covid-19 diagnoses in the State, Mr Varadkar urged people not to focus too much on a single day’s numbers. “Most people testing positive aren’t even sick, have no symptoms at all. We need to look at other metrics as well, the positivity rate, the R number, the number of people in hospital, the number of deaths, for example.”