Leo Varadkar and Arlene Foster are to meet on Saturday to discuss an all-of-Ireland approach to combatting coronavirus.
With mass gatherings including sporting events and concerts to be banned across the UK from next weekend, pressure was growing on Northern Irish leaders to close schools in line with the move south of the border.
The caretaker taoiseach and first minister will meet in Armagh as part of a wider delegation involving Ireland’s chief medical officer, who has been acting on Irish as well as EU modelling.
The meeting comes as the leader of the Catholic church in Ireland called on Northern Irish leaders to close all schools. He told Stormont’s education minister, the Democratic Unionist party’s Peter Weir, that “we need to fight this virus together”.
Also at the meeting will be Ireland’s deputy prime minister Simon Coveney, the health minister, Simon Harris, and his Stormont counterpart, Robin Swann.
They will be meeting under the framework of the North South ministerial council set up under the Good Friday agreement to promote consultation and cooperation across the island.
The Stormont assembly was holding firm on the UK approach on Thursday when Varadkar announced, in an address to the nation from Washington, that schools would close.
Splits emerged, however, between Foster and her deputy first minister, Michelle O’Neill, on Friday.
O’Neill, who is also Sinn Féin’s Northern Ireland leader, called for schools to be closed. “Now is the time for action” and Northern Ireland should “err on the side of caution,” she said.
Nine new coronavirus cases were recorded in Northern Ireland on Friday, bringing the total to 29. Three were community transmissions, the first recorded.
Twenty new cases were reported in the republic, the second highest daily jump bringing the total to 90.
Harris said on Friday that he had spoken to the UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, before the announcement about the schools closure.
More details of Ireland’s contingency planning emerged on Saturday. It is looking for 10,000 beds for its worst-case scenario with the possibility of using hotel rooms, student accommodation halls and military sites.
Dublin is also looking at releasing hundreds of prisoners as the Irish Prison Service warned of the “significant challenges” it faced containing the spread of the virus.
source https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/14/varadkar-and-foster-to-discuss-all-of-ireland-coronavirus-approach
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