Taoiseach hopes to announce easing of Covid restrictions from next week

Micheál Martin has said "progress" is being made against the Omicron variant and has indicated that restrictions could be relaxed after the next Nphet meeting. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins

The Taoiseach has said he hopes to be in a position to announce the easing restrictions from next week.

Micheál Martin has said "progress" is being made against the Omicron variant and has indicated that restrictions could be relaxed after the next Nphet meeting.

"There will be a meeting of Nphet next week. And I would hope that we would be in a position to move forward in terms of the current restrictions, but I'm not in a position yet to say anything definitive about that. I want to really see what the public health people are saying and also have a sense of where Omicron is. But so far so good in respect of the fact that it's not translating into ICU attendances and the case numbers seem to be levelling. So we are hopeful in terms of the progress we've made to date."

Mr Martin said that the current closing times for pubs and restaurants as well as other restrictions on hospitality will be examined.

"We will be looking at hospitality and we'll be looking at obviously the 8pm restriction as well. With Catherine [Martin] and others across Cabinet, we're looking at how again can we can continue to support artists and performers."

He added: "It has been a very transmissible variant which in its own way then makes gatherings potentially challenging. That said, I want to pay tribute to the sector for their great tolerance and forbearance it has kept with it, with many performances during the day and so on and earlier in the day and really trying to innovate around restrictions. The restrictions are very severe on the sector, there's no point in saying anything else."

Deputy Chief Medical Officer Ronan Glynn commented saying: "There are certainly reasons for optimism and hope and we see across Europe that a number of countries have experienced a similar picture to ourselves in that the numbers in ICU have remained stable.

"But I think it is a little too early for us to conclude on that at this point. We all want that to be true and we all want to move on from this but from our perspective we need another week's worth of data. "