Re-opening schools ‘among the safest things’ in next few months, Taoiseach says

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said that “among the safest things” the State can do in the next few months is to reopen schools for children.

Emerging evidence from both Ireland and internationally was to allow children return to education and to allow childcare facilities to reopen, he said.

Mr Varadkar referred to a conversation he and Minister for Health Simon Harris had with Dr Mike Ryan of the World Health Organisation on Wednesday and the latest report from the Health Information Quality Authority in relation to children.

He also said that assuming the trajectory of the pandemic went in the right direction it would be possible for children to meet grandparents sometime before the end of summer.

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“(Dr Ryan and HIQA)were much of the view that the emerging evidence is that among the safest things that we can do over the next couple of months, is to re-open our schools, to re-open our child care facilities to allow children, return to education and return to normal life.”

Europe

He said he was conscious of the fact that some countries in Europe, never fully closed their schools, and some never fully closed their childcare facilities.

“I think it wouldn’t be a good reflection on us, as a society for us to be the last people who are able to re-open our schools and re-open our childcare facilities,” he said.

“But we need to make sure we do it safely and work with the education sector and the childcare sector to make sure that it’s possible, but it is encouraging that there is growing evidence that those who are at least, at least risk from the virus are children, young people, and on like for example with influenza they don’t appear to be super spreaders, and I think that is very significant,” he said.

He said schools and contact with grandparents would not form part of the changes announced on Monday.

“Of course everybody wants grandchildren to be able to see our grandparents and them to be able to help their grandchildren again,” he said.

“I know some grandparents who have yet to see and meet and hold their newborn grandchild and you can imagine how they must feel now. So you know I think those things, assuming everything else goes in the right direction will be possible over the course of the summer, but won’t be among the actions that we’ll be announcing on Monday.”

Mr Harris added that the expert advice as of now is that children must continue to socially distance but said the advice would be revised in light of changing circumstances.

Testing

Both politicians were speaking at the office of the Revenue Commissioners in D’Olier Street, Dublin where one of the main contact tracing centres in the State is located.

Mr Varadkar said the HSE was now in a position to carry out 100,000 tests for the virus each week and was confident it could achieve a turnaround time of 72 hours for test results.

He said the HSE would publish new plans tomorrow with key performance indicators. He also said he accepted the State had not achieved some of the previous targets it set out for itself.

“I absolutely accept criticisms from anyone that says we should have done that sooner but I can also guarantee that absolutely everyone across the system is pulling out all the stops to get to this point.”

He said he was glad to have got to this point.

“And the HSE has done a phenomenal job I think in terms of testing, as have all the staff in our labs around the country . . . The target is absolutely to have a test result turnaround time of 72 hours, but it’ll never be 100 per cent you know. There isn’t a test that I’m aware of where you get the results within 72 hours 100 per cent of the time.”

He said the country had made enormous strides over the past couple of weeks as regards testing, going from a starting point of zero to scale it up to 100,000 per week. He said Ireland was now in the top tier of countries for Europe.

Asked about the economy, Mr Varadkar accepted the deficit for 2020 could be in the order of €30 billion and any prediction he would make about how soon or how robust the recovery would be would be in the “realms of astrology”.

He said the priority for the Government should be about job creation and getting people back to work. He said the fundamentals in the economy were strong enough.

Asked about comments from Fine Gael and Green Party representatives criticising their respective positions on private property, Mr Varadkar said such comments were unhelpful. He said Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party were in discussions and doing so on the basis of good faith.