Hair salon should have been informed of Covid case, says Taoiseach

Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said a hair salon which looked after a client who was later confirmed as having Covid-19 should have been informed of the positive case.

He said it was particularly important salon employees were informed, as the country must now act as if the more transmissible form of Covid-19 is here.

“If someone spends three and a half hours in a salon then they should have been told, of course. The reason for it, is because we’re acting as if the variant is here. That’s my view, and I would have thought they were close contacts. That would be my lay person’s assessment of it,” he said.

He was speaking on RTÉ's Today with Claire Byrne programme where he was asked about a newspaper report that a Dublin hair salon owner had not been told about a client who tested positive for Covid-19 even though the client has spent three and a half hours in the salon.

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Hair stylist Ceira Lambert, whose salon is based in Cabinteely told The Irish Independent she was “fuming” when nobody in the HSE’s contact tracing system informed her.

She said she was only alerted to the confirmed case after several employees received a notification on the HSE’s Covid app stating they had been in contact with a person who had the virus. The stylist who did the client’s hair received no alert as she did not have the app installed.

The salon owner then investigated which customer had been infected, arranged for testing for all of he staff, and contacted other clients herself who had visited the salon on the same morning.

The Taoiseach said the HSE had “always adopted the principle of not telling employers, not telling even school principals in some situations, about a particular employee getting the virus. That has been a bone of contention”.

He added: “When I read that story, I thought that they should have been told. I would like to get further detail from the HSE on that specific case.

“I don’t have the detail of the case itself but equally if you think of it if somebody is two and a half hours in a particular salon, given we have to act now as if the variant is here, then we have to really assess that in terms of the probability of somebody more likely picking up [the virus] in certain scenarios, and that’s why we’ve taken the precautionary principle of closing personal services.”

Hair salons must close again on Christmas Eve following the announcement of further Covid-10 restrictions by the Government on Tuesday.

The Taoiseach added that the decision to close personal services was difficult, and it will be reviewed in the coming weeks.

The HSE has been contacted for comment.