This looks weird. The circumstances the Other Taoiseach describes here aren’t the circumstances of people going on their holidays which the papers have reported is prompting cutting of welfare payments.

Some options occur: https://twitter.com/rtetwip/status/1287345081016635394

Option 1: This report conflates two different groups incorrectly. Report headline refers to “holiday makers” but maybe the actual interventions relate to people who are not ordinarily resident in the country.

https://twitter.com/qualann/status/1287344029705949184?s=21 https://twitter.com/qualann/status/1287344029705949184

T assess that, we’d require clarification of what “rules” are cited that 104 people might have been deemed to be in breach of.

The Other Taoiseach doesn’t cite any claim akin to that made in the last paragraph of the report, that the rules of pandemic payments forbid travel.

Ah, thanks to @Maebhcon we have more and better data. This is a Ministerial order dated the 10th July.

https://twitter.com/maebhcon/status/1287401800396677121?s=21 https://twitter.com/maebhcon/status/1287401800396677121

Now I am as interested as anyone in the suppression of Covid infection, but this seems to offer some significant questions of equity and interference in people’s private decision making.

Remember, the Covid advice, is just advice, not law. But here it creates a penalty.

The Travel advisory is now to be enforced by police and state officers at the price of a loss of household income, but only against Social Welfare recipients.

And, under justification of a the secondary legislation used by the Minister to issue an SI, there appears to be an extraordinary expansion of the usually targeted data sharing system intended to address fraud, into a mass surveillance model.