Debate over holidays abroad just adding to Covid travel confusion
Overseas travel accounts for a minute fraction of virus cases, so why are we stopping people from going on sun holidays asks Maeve Sheehan
GARY Vesey observes the Irish in the Algarve from a unique vantage point: over the top of his guitar while perched on a bar stool.
On Wednesday night, he blasted out his three-hour set at the Black Anchor Irish pub in Tavira to a greatly reduced audience that included just a smattering of Irish people.
They were mostly expats who own apartments in the area, who had either been there since lockdown or were taking up residence for the season. Only a handful of Irish seemed to be on the twoweek holiday turnaround, he reckons.
“These are reluctant to come, but those who are coming are people who can afford to have that two weeks’ quarantine when they go home. Because they are working from home, it won’t affect their daily life,” he says
“The people who usually come — the families — they can’t come. My own family can’t come to see their grandson. They can’t make it.”
Vesey, formerly a butcher but an aspiring musician in his native Achill, Co Mayo, moved to the Algarve for a summer to try his hand playing the Irish bars. He fell in love and took his chances.
Twelve years later, he is married with a baby and, until Covid-19 struck, had a successful career as a professional musician, playing Irish pubs across the Algarve.
“I’ve gone from six nights to no nights, and I’m back now to doing three nights,” he says.
But the scene is the same from Tavira to further along the Portuguese coast in Vilamoura, where O’Shea’s pub is an “Irish hotspot”.
According to Vesey, it would usually hold 100 people a night for seven nights of live music, with Vesey doing three of those nights. The pub is now averaging 10 to 15 customers over the course of an evening that ends at 11pm sharp.
Back at the Black Anchor, Joy Kennedy, who owns the pub with her husband Vinnie, said it is clear that Irish people are paying heed to the public health advice, as people are in Portugal.
“You know, we’re seeing a few [Irish] faces around that we’d know but nothing like before,” she says.
“Most of our business now at the moment is Spanish, Portuguese, French, and we have quite a big Scandinavian presence with lots of Swedes and Norwegians living here.”
Even though business is suffering, Joy takes the long view. “I think people are listening at home,” she says. “I think everybody has just got to behave for a few months, just get another few months over with, and schools reopened in Ireland. Let people get back to some sort of normality. And we will be here afterwards, hopefully.”
STAYING PUT
Despite all the public commentary on overseas travel lately, the vast majority of people seem to be sticking with the public health advice and choosing to holiday at home.
The dearth of Irish tourists in traditional overseas resorts is reflected in figures from the Central Statistics Office published last week that reveal a staggering collapse in overseas travel.
In June this year, 73,900 people went through the departures lounge and
57,100 people landed in arrivals. Although still a lot of people, it is a 96pcplus drop when compared with June last year, when two million people travelled in each direction in and out of Ireland.
For those heeding public health advice, a week of downpours has given way to a damp August bank holiday weekend and the final month of summer lies ahead. Most people don’t need forecasters to predict there will be rain. With weather like that, perhaps it’s no surprise that overseas travel — whether incoming or outgoing or just staying put — seems to have become the scourge of the summer.
For a fortnight last month, incoming American tourists were a target — especially those accused of not completing the required quarantining for 14 days on arrival. Anecdotal evidence was that some Americans were not.
At one point, Professor Sam McConkey, head of the department of international health and tropical medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, suggested that jailing a few Americans for three months in Mountjoy would “send out a clear message that we have law and order”.
Last week attention turned to people leaving Ireland. Specifically those on Covid-19 pandemic unemployment payments taking trips abroad, and the 2,500 travellers who had their Covid-19 payment stopped. The great majority of people who had their payments cut were leaving the country permanently and just 85 were actually going on holiday.
TESTING TIMES
Public health officials are clearly getting tired of the public obsession with people travelling through our airports.
The acting chief medical officer, Dr
Ronan Glynn, said the focus on international travel was a “distraction”.
A spike of 85 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 reported on Thursday spread in clusters in family homes, construction sites and a pet food factory. Only two cases were associated with overseas travel, Dr Glynn said. In fact, since the start of the pandemic, travel abroad has accounted for a tiny fraction of 26,000-plus confirmed cases: just 638, or 2.46pc, according to a report published last week by the Health Protection Surveillance Centre.
According to Dr Glynn, debate about Irish people going on foreign holidays could detract from the “core message” that individuals have the power to control the spread of the virus.
The resurgence of Covid-19 across the world means freedom to travel is inevitably going to remain under scrutiny in Ireland.
According to figures recently collated by the Department of Transport on arrivals into Ireland, the biggest cohort of passengers arriving into Irish airports are coming from the some of the countries worst hit by a resurgence.
Passenger data published by the Department of Transport last week, in response to a parliamentary question, shows that the vast majority of passengers arrive here from Britain, which had reported its highest number of new Covid-19 infections in more than a month last Thursday.
In the week of July 13 to 19, some 10,700 passengers from Britain arrived at Dublin Airport. In the same week, 4,965 passengers arrived from Spain and just over 2,000 each from France and Germany. Similar numbers of 2,020 and 2,041 flew in from Poland and from the Netherlands.
The figures also show that in the first three weeks in July, more than 3,000 people arrived in Dublin Airport from the Covid-ravaged US — a rough average of 1,000 passengers a week.
Fifteen passengers came off US flights to Shannon Airport over the same threeweek period.
The figures do not tell us how many passengers are tourists, how many are on business trips or how many are Irish residents returning home.
Corresponding figures for departures were not available last week.
The Government has so far resisted any form of mandatory intervention. It has not curtailed flights or introduced Covid-19 testing at airports or ports.
A Green List of acceptable countries that people can travel to without having to quarantine — which includes Estonia, Cyprus, Malta and Italy — has already dated.
But confusingly, the public health advice is not to travel. Ireland is the only European Union country that does not restrict American flights. Arriving passengers who are not on Green List countries are obliged by law to record their place of quarantine with officials on arrival in Ireland.
Failure to fill out the form is an offence resulting in a fine. Quarantine itself is not mandatory.
The Department of Transport is investigating screening passengers before they ever arrive in Ireland. The department’s acting secretary general, Ken Spratt, told an Oireachtas committee that visitors to Ireland could be asked to have a Covid-19 test before they travel, present proof of a negative test on arrival, or be barred from entry to the State.
ONGOING TASK
Eliminating the virus — which some scientists have called for — is “impossible” without closing borders, according to Dr Bill Tormey, consultant chemical pathologist at Beaumont Hospital. The only solution remains testing — and even that is uncertain, he says. He points to research from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Tropical Medicine which shows high levels of false negatives.
“The more I delve into the details of Covid, the more depressing it is,” he said. “There is uncertainty. I think we have to have a recognition that there is no right answer and we should test everybody. If we pick up 50pc of the incoming positives we have done ourselves a big favour but we need very quick contact-tracing to stay on top of it.”
The Government has made clear time and again the importance of keeping the country open for business in every sense. But the sense of urgency on to how to balance that with public health continues to grow.
The numbers departing these shores — although tiny compared with previous years — are increasing. By the third week of July, an average of 12,200 passengers were travelling through Dublin Airport daily, up from 4,155 in the last week in June.
Ryanair, which flies to several countries on the Green List, claims Irish people are booking “in their thousands to summer destinations such as Greece and Italy” in August and September.
Down on Spain’s Costa del Sol, the expats are missing the annual influx of Irish, according to Terry McKinley, who runs the Irish Association Spain.
Gerry McGovern, who manages The Claddagh in Marbella, reports that “the only Irish out here are the dwelling owners, the people that own apartments. They are the only people we have seen so far”.
As for the two-week holidaymakers, “we haven’t seen any of them yet”, he said. Nor have the fabled students on the annual end-of-school holiday abroad made their presence felt. “And you couldn’t miss them,” he added.