{"id":1447,"date":"2021-02-10T09:20:54","date_gmt":"2021-02-10T09:20:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.socialdemocrats.ie\/taoiseach-needs-to-assign-responsibility-for-travel-restrictions-to-new-minister\/"},"modified":"2021-02-10T09:20:54","modified_gmt":"2021-02-10T09:20:54","slug":"taoiseach-needs-to-assign-responsibility-for-travel-restrictions-to-new-minister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.socialdemocrats.ie\/ga\/taoiseach-needs-to-assign-responsibility-for-travel-restrictions-to-new-minister\/","title":{"rendered":"Taoiseach needs to assign responsibility for travel restrictions to new Minister"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Speaking out in favour of tighter monitoring of international travel, R\u00f3is\u00edn Shortall TD, co-leader of the Social Democrats, has called on the Taoiseach to assign responsibility for travel and quarantining to a different Minister.<\/p>\n<p>Deputy Shortall, who is raising the issue in the D\u00e1il today, commented:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs it stands, the Minister for Health is dealing with the huge demands of responding to the pandemic, rolling out the vaccination programme, and maintaining our health service. It simply does not make sense that the same Minister would also have responsibility for implementing and overseeing the entire regime for monitoring international travel during the pandemic.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is particularly important now that the UK has announced new mandatory hotel quarantine rules for UK and Irish residents. This work demands a serious time commitment and renewed focus to address both ongoing issues and newly emerging problems. These include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Oversight of home quarantining<\/li>\n<li>Preparation for mandatory hotel quarantining, including passing necessary legislation, procuring hotels and transport, and ensuring adequate security measures<\/li>\n<li>Policing at ports and airports in line with new rules<\/li>\n<li>Stopping the \u2018Dublin dodge\u2019, whereby Dublin is being used as a backdoor to access Northern Ireland and avoid UK travel rules<\/li>\n<li>Sharing passenger locator forms across jurisdictions<\/li>\n<li>Implementing a joint strategy with Northern Ireland to ensure the border can remain open while preventing backdoor entries to both countries<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u201cThere are three other Ministers who play a role in this area and who have had fewer additional demands placed on their time as a result of the pandemic than the Health Minister \u2013 these are Justice, Foreign Affairs and Transport.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTravel has been a weak link in the Government\u2019s strategy from the beginning, and it would be foolhardy to allow that to continue. In the last week alone, 12,730 people arrived into Irish airports from overseas. We need to make a serious move now to prevent the importation of the virus given the enormous challenges posed by the new variants that we are aware of, as well as the potential of unknown emerging variants.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Taoiseach needs to assign responsibility to a different Minister to oversee travel restrictions and monitor the public\u2019s adherence. He must ensure that this extremely important body of work gets the resources it requires at this time in order to protect our public and prevent further importation of the virus and new variants.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>February 10, 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaking out in favour of tighter monitoring of international travel, R\u00f3is\u00edn Shortall TD, co-leader of the Social Democrats, has called on the Taoiseach to assign responsibility for travel and quarantining to a different Minister. Deputy Shortall, who is raising the issue in the D\u00e1il today, commented: \u201cAs it stands, the Minister for Health is dealing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1305,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,264],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press-release","category-roisin-shortall"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Taoiseach needs to assign responsibility for travel restrictions to new Minister - Social Democrats<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.socialdemocrats.ie\/taoiseach-needs-to-assign-responsibility-for-travel-restrictions-to-new-minister\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"ga_IE\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Taoiseach needs to assign responsibility for travel restrictions to new Minister - Social Democrats\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Speaking out in favour of tighter monitoring of international travel, R\u00f3is\u00edn Shortall TD, co-leader of the Social Democrats, has called on the Taoiseach to assign responsibility for travel and quarantining to a different Minister. 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