Michael O’Leary has dismissed the latest travel advice issued by NPHET to the Government as “ineffective and inappropriate gobbledygook.”
The Ryanair boss took issue with the new rules requiring all incoming passengers to present either a negative PCR or antigen test that will be effective from Friday, 3 December.
The new advice has been dismissed as “nonsense, which has been imposed without consultation with the airlines, and without any explanation as to how this gobbledygook is to be monitored or controlled either by the airlines or Irish Border Control.”
In a statement, the bullish CEO said: “When EU passengers have, for the last 6 months, been travelling safely with the benefit of the EU DCC or negative PCRs, what medical or health benefit is to be derived by asking these passengers to now produce negative antigen tests, when both NPHET and the CMO have been opposed to antigen tests for 18 months?”
“How are airline or Border Control staff supposed to understand what a professionally done antigen test is, or looks like, when neither the CMO nor the Govt have even defined it?” O’Leary continued.
A farce
Ryanair further questioned how it made sense that vaccinated passengers would have to present a negative test if arriving from the UK but unvaccinated people could cross the border from Northern Ireland into the Republic without any checks, dismissing it as “yet another NPHET ‘travel policy’ farce.”
The airline has called on the Government to “abandon this latest NPHET gobbledygook and return to a simple, and readily understood system, followed by most of the rest of the EU, which protects free movement of EU citizens, subject only to production of an EU DCC or a negative PCR test.”
