Airport authority to call for passengers to be tested before travelling to Ireland

The company managing Ireland’s largest airports is to call for passengers to be tested for COVID-19 before travelling here.

Representatives of the aviation industry will appear before the Dáil COVID-19 committee later today.

In its opening statement. DAA, which manages Dublin and Cork Airports, will welcome the ‘green list’ for international travel – but will warn that the countries on the list represented only 9% of its traffic last year.

It will recognise that international travel and COVID-19 are “likely to be unwitting travel companions for some time to come” and outline the measures it has taken to protect passengers and staff.

The authority will say it is working with authorities to make the process for tracking visitors “more robust” by opening a call centre to check the information on Passenger Locator Forms.

It will say there “may also be merit” in requiring all passengers that arrive in from a non-green list country to prove they are virus-free.

This would be done through a COVID-19 test taken 72 hours or less before travel with proof of a negative test required to get on the plane.

The authority will also call for the ‘green list’ to be extended – noting that selling every available seat to the included countries “wouldn’t add much more than 100,000 passengers” over a month – less than might have flown in a single day before the outbreak.