Mandatory quarantine has ‘descended into chaos’, says Deputy Shortall

Co-leader of the Social Democrats Róisín Shortall says that the mandatory quarantine system established by the Government three weeks ago “has descended into chaos” after the scheme was paused due to over capacity.

“Last night, the government’s mandatory quarantine system had to pause bookings as it ran out of hotel capacity – just 18 days after it was set up,” says Deputy Shortall.

“Given there are nearly 150,000 hotel rooms in Ireland, most of which are empty, it beggars belief the government is unable to find additional capacity.

“Health Minister Stephen Donnelly has now said the system will be unable to accept bookings until Monday, when 300 additional rooms will become available.

“Given passengers from an additional 16 countries will be entering mandatory quarantine from tomorrow, can he give any guarantee that this paltry figure will be enough?

“Has the government done any modelling to gauge the projected demand for these rooms?”

Deputy Shortall says that there is “confusion” surrounding the metrics the Government are using to determine entry to hotel quarantine.

“On Monday, Minister Donnelly stated the primary metric determining entry to mandatory quarantine, for EU countries, is variants of concern.

“However, there are differing capacities to investigate variants across Europe – with some countries having very low levels of Covid surveillance, meaning they are unlikely to detect variants.

“Given there is no uniform capacity to detect variants across the EU, it is difficult to understand why variants, rather than incidence rate, is the government’s primary metric.

“This needs to be explained. It is important that the system is transparent so that the public retains confidence in it.”