New restrictions: Exceptions for leaving your home

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said that from midnight 27 March and for a two-week period, until Easter Sunday, everybody must stay at home, in all circumstances:

Except

– To travel to and from work for the purposes of work only where the work is an essential health, social care or other essential service or cannot be done from home (a list of these will be provided)

– To shop for food or household goods or collect a meal

– To attend medical appointments or collect medicines and other health products

– For vital family reasons, such as providing care to children, elderly or vulnerable people

– To take brief individual personal exercise within 2km of your own home which may include children from your own household as long as you adhere to two-metre physical distancing

– For farming purposes that is food production and care of animals

– All public and private gatherings of any number of people outside a single household or living unit are prohibited. The virus might be in your household already so please don’t spread it to someone else

– This prohibition includes social family visits that are not for vital reasons already mentioned

– A further range of non-essential shops and services will be closed. The guidance given earlier this week in respect of retail outlets will be revised to reflect this

– Adult community education centres and local community centres will be shut

– All non-essential surgery and health procedures and all other non-essential health services will be postponed

– All visits to hospitals, residential healthcare settings and prisons are to cease, with specific exceptions on compassionate grounds

– Shielding or cocooning will be introduced for all those 70 years of age and specified categories of people who are extremely vulnerable to Covid-19

– Travel to our offshore islands will be limited to residents of those islands

– Pharmacists will be permitted to dispense medicines outside of the current period of validity with an existing prescription in line with the pharmacists clinical judgement

– All public transport and passenger travel will be restricted to essential workers and people providing essential services

– Outside of the reasons listed there is to be no travel outside a 2km radius of your home for any reason