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DUBLIN — Ireland will gradually unwind its lockdown measures over the coming two months as vaccinations lower the risk posed by COVID-19 to public health, Prime Minister Micheál Martin said Thursday night.
In a live televised address after his cabinet approved the plans, Martin said many features of life off limits since Christmas would reopen on May 10.
“As disruptive, as lonely, as frustrating and as sad as the last year has been, we are getting through it,” Martin said. “A degree of normality is returning. The company of friends and relations is returning. Hope is returning.”
The Irish have been exceptionally slow to ease restrictions this year in part because of hard-learned lessons. When Martin’s government aggressively reopened Ireland in the three weeks before Christmas, the move was blamed for a sharp rise in cases of COVID.
Mixed groups were permitted to gather for dinners and drinks at newly reopened restaurants and gastropubs, then to travel to their relatives’ homes nationwide. Tens of thousands of Irish people living and working in England also traveled home for the holidays, bringing the new potentially more infectious B117 variant with them. In early January, as a result, Ireland recorded the world’s fastest infection rate.
Under the new plans, people will be permitted to travel across county lines, a previous no-no enforced by police checkpoints and fines. Hairdressers and barbers will resume tending the nation’s hair. Amateur and youth sports teams can resume training outdoors.
Up to 50 people will be permitted to attend funerals and weddings as well as church services, which have been online throughout 2021.
Thousands of shops that have been closed since Christmas Eve will reopen on May 17. Economists anticipate a spending spree in a nation that has banked an extra €15 billion in household savings during the pandemic.
Martin said his government hopes to relaunch domestic leisure and tourism in the next phase. Hotels would reopen on June 2 and restaurants and pubs five days later, but only for outdoor dining and drinking, with groups capped at six people. Most of Ireland’s 7,000 pubs and bars have been shut since before St. Patrick’s Day 13 months ago. Gyms and cinemas would reopen on June 7 as well.
But Martin stressed that the June changes would depend on whether the May relaxations drive a spike in new infections.
Ireland took its first tentative steps out of lockdown last month when primary and secondary students returned to their classrooms, but university courses have remained online-only.
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