The Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, and Minister for Health, Simon Harris, have issued strict guidelines for people to stay at home from midnight on 27 March 2020.
The main rule is to STAY AT HOME. You can only leave your home to:
- Travel to or from work if you are providing an essential service (full list will be available soon).
- Shop for food. You can get the list of essential retail outlets from gov.ie.
- Collect medical prescriptions and medical supplies and go to medical appointments
- Carry out vital services like caring (including family carers)
- Exercise briefly within 2 kilometres of your house. (You can bring children but must keep 2 metres away from others for social distancing)
- Do farm work
You cannot arrange a gathering with anybody you do not live with.
Everyone who can work from home must work from home. This includes essential workers and workers in essential government, utilities or other functions.
Cocooning will be introduced for people over 70 and people who are extremely medically vulnerable to COVID-19. Cocooning is a measure to protect people over 70 years or extremely medically vulnerable people by minimising interaction between them and others.
This means that these people should not leave their homes. Even within their homes they should minimise all non-essential contact with other members of their household.
These measures are in place until until Sunday 12 April. Read more about the new measures on gov.ie.
You can also read our document on public health measures for COVID-19 in Ireland and get detailed information in the coronavirus section of citizensinformation.ie.