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LAST UPDATE | 24 May 2021
TOURISM AND CULTURE Minister Catherine Martin has said she hopes that some test live events could take place as early as next month and that they will be across “a variety of genres”.
Martin was speaking at the beginning of an important week in the reopening of Irish society, with a comprehensive government announcement due on Friday.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin said that Friday’s announcement would provide “timelines” around the reopening of sectors such as aviation, tourism and hospitality but that the government would be taking a “cautious” approach.
He also hinted that the reopening of indoor dining and drinking would not necessarily take place at the beginning of July, something that industry groups have been pushing for.
The National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) will meet on Thursday to prepare advice for government, after which the Cabinet Covid sub-committee will meet before a full Cabinet meeting on Friday.
Speaking to reporters this afternoon at the National Museum of Ireland, Minister Catherine Martin emphasised the importance of tourism and the live events sector.
She said that the livelihoods of performers had been “devastated” by Covid-19 restrictions.
At the Cabinet meetings this week, Martin said she intends to present proposals for live events to be held on a test basis to prepare for the wider return of live music and other entertainment.
She said these events are being planned “right across the country” and include music genres “from rock to classical, also comedy and of course theatre”.
The minister said the trial events would be both indoors and outdoors.
“The numbers would vary according to the event or the venue. I can’t reveal or speculate on the numbers right now but it will depend on what’s presented to NPHET on Thursday and the public health advice there. ”
She added:
I would like to see some of these events in June, so my hope would be that they be in June and July, the sooner the better in order to get the reopening. We’re moving well into vaccinations, so the sooner the better for me and I would be aiming for June.
Martin said she believes antigen testing at events is “something we should give consideration to” but that this also needs to be discussed with NPHET.
The minister also spoke about the phased reopening of the hospitality sector, which will see hotels and B&Bs reopening their doors on 2 June, with outdoor services in restaurants and pubs to resume on 7 June.
Catherine Martin said she expects industry guidelines on this reopening of dining to be published “early this week”.
The guidelines for outdoor dining will see the requirement for social distancing reduced to one metre. The minister said further guidelines for indoor dining will be devised later.
Hotels and guesthouses are permitted to serve food indoors to residents when they reopen next week.
Speaking earlier today, Taoiseach Micheál Martin repeated the government’s preference that “outdoor is best” for the summer and that “indoor has been challenging” with respect to controlling the outbreak of Covid-19.
There is no fixed date set for the return of indoor dining but it’s expected to be some time in July.
Tánaiste Leo Varadkar said last week that he hopes it would be in “early July” but the Taoiseach today suggested that it may also be later in the month.
“We’ll have outdoor dining, outdoor drinking from the 7 June onwards, we will have hotels, B&Bs and guesthouses available from the 2 June for people to book and see how that impacts on the disease,” he told RTÉ’s Today with Claire Byrne.
We’ll see what happens during July. If you look, what we’ve been doing from April and May, everything wasn’t done the first week of those particular months when it began to reopen. Full retail was the 17th, so it’s a graduated approach we will be adopting.
The Taoiseach’s comments about indoor dining potentially remaining closed into July comes as indoor hospitality returned in Northern Ireland from today.
The Restaurants Association of Ireland (RAI) is criticising the government’s graduated approach, arguing that with hotels opening next week allowed to serve customers indoors, this should apply to all restaurants.
RAI CEO Adrian Cummins has also argued that the disparity could see Irish customers travelling to Northern Ireland.
“There’s no difference in dining in a hotel restaurant than any other food service establishment. Thousands of day trippers will now cross the border to sample Northern Ireland’s hospitality, which is fully open from today,” he said.
The Taoiseach argued today that the “gradual” approach being taken by the government “is working”, with a number of sectors of society returning without “any spikes of significance”.
“So far so good in terms of the reopening of society,” he said.
The Taoiseach spoke about NPHET’s concerns about the so-called ‘Indian variant’ of Covid-19, with CMO Tony Holohan on Friday describing it as a “dark cloud on the horizon”.
Martin said these concerns will be taken into consideration when deciding this week on the plan forward.
“It’s steady as she goes to the end of this month, it’ll be steady in June. We’ll see what’s possible in July,” he said.
The Taoiseach was also asked about plans for the return of events, and specifically whether there could be crowds at the All-Ireland Finals at the end of August.
“I think we have to go slowly, let’s take it step-by-step, let’s see how the impact of the variants work out. By the time the All Ireland Finals are played we will have advanced vaccinations much more significantly. But again I’m not getting into specifics in terms of numbers. Some people are speculating on numbers, again a cautious approach will apply there.”
On aviation and how Ireland plans to use the EU’s Digital Green Cert, the Taoiseach said that he will be discussing the issue of travel at an European Council meeting that begins today.
Have been using it on my nexus 5 since it came out. Works fine. Notifications are handled better and am getting slightly better battery life.
Does showbox work with lollipop
Not on mine anyway. Pain in the arse
I’ve noticed its considerably slower than before on my version 1 nexus7
Same for me too actually. Logged a Google bug report but nothing back yet
When is it coming to the 3310?
It completely wrecked my Nexus 7 tablet. Had to factory reset and disable a bunch of graphics and app settings to regain functionality. Read the Google forums for your phone or tablet before you update!!!
I think that it only negatively affected the 2012 version of the Nexus 7 and there’s a patched version available now.
I’ve had Lollipop on my Nexus 4 since November and I think it’s great.
Do you not find your nexus 4 keeps randomly turning off since the update?
Nope – it’s worked fine. My wife has it on hers also with no problems.
Great update on nexus 4, but I did find it would shut off randomly and certain apps such as Facebook would stop responding quite often. Absolutely no change to the battery life, still find it shockingly bad in the nexus.
Same with me but the 5.0.2 update earlier this week fixed it. Its flying now!
Looking forward to it apparently gives a huge performance boost for the Galaxy Note 3.
Less than 0.1% of Android devices
Thats about 1 million devices.
Not to make his a fanboy argument, but this is why iOS & apple is so popular. It’ll only not work on the oldest of devices. Everything is manufactured by the one company, so there’s no variations in hardware to account for.
Last I heard iOS 8 was on 50% of devices within a week of release and is now circa 70%, with over 20% on iOS 7 & older devices making up the balance.
Akin to a “No offence but… *causes offence*” statement :)
If Android Manufacturers used the default OS, they would probably have more phones upgraded to this software regularly. They don’t unfortunately. But with the Material UI, I believe they might be trying to unite the Manufacturers for this very reason.
I’ve recently switched to a Nexus, and find it great. Previously had a Samsung which was slow to get updates. And their software was laggy on occasion.
Ahhhhh not really. The latest ios had many problems at launch and let’s not forget the apple maps failure
Was offered it almost immediately on my Nexus.
It took 2 more months of declining the update for the prompt to disappear.
No issue with android, for me its the apps.
Update android & you have to update the apps…. Sometimes updates are worse than the original, so I’m happy to stay put.
Ah stop lad.
Great news.
Ruined my nexus…..apps crash, takes twice as long to charge, turns itself off. Please read up on it before you download
Meanwhile Apple’s latest iOS version (iOS 8) is on 68% of all active iOS devices.
Another pointless dogmatic article. The self-important narcissists are more concerned about trivial things, just look at the view counts – this article has 3911 views at the time of writing and the “Nurses from Beaumont ……….” have 1911 views.
It’s true what they say…”Money can’t buy you logic”
I bet you’re great craic altogether.
I have android 4.4.2 on my Samsung S4 that is rooted and it was installed via program on pc.
Will I be able to update it to lollipop when it is available or will I have to install it manually?
Sounds like you’ll have to beat it in with a hammer.
Best of luck with it.
You can indeed install the update :) You can download and install the Google Edition of Lollipop from http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2557353 , as long as you have root – I have it installed a while now and love it! No issues at all – everything works.
Just be aware that you lose the Samsung UI and will have the default Google edition, there’s a lot of extra little subtleties which you will likely miss. I found it lacking in options and settings features which I use regularly gone when I went to tried stock 4.4.3 before Xmass, I ended going back to 4.4.2 and just put up with the poorer battery management. I should also mention it’s harder to find i9505 network roms online to revert back to, there were 2 variants for 3 and one of them has a kernel which only gave me Edge and 4G, no option for HSPA. Took me 4 hrs to dl the correct one from only one link I could find at 40kb/s. Just a few things to keep in mind, that and I doubt Samsung will release 4.4.3 or higher for the S4 at this stage so it’s weighted decision.
The connectivity that one receives with a given rom is most likely down to the modem that you have installed. You can download different modems online for your device before ever rooting so that you can revert easily. Random reboots is also often caused by an incorrect modem installed.
Running 5.0.2 on my old sgs2. Very happy
You can run lollipop on your sgs4 today.
Still waiting on it for my onePlus. Only Google devices got it, and other phone developers take 3 months to adapt it for each hardware device. Alpha builds are available, but it’s like windows 98 with their driver problems all over again. All down to Google not providing a proper separation between kernel and OS that results in small numbers of upgrades. But then again, maybe android users are happy with what they have.
Still no sign on my Moto G play edition.
“All down to Google not providing a proper separation between kernel and OS that results in small numbers of upgrades.”
That’s not for Google to deal with nor their fault, nor maintain, support.
That is the manufacturer’s decision on whether to support it, case in point, look at the Samsung Galaxy variants, one type for Asia which is CDMA, one type for Europe GSM, one type for USA, LTE/GSM, along with minor differences in the chipset itself.
Far too many different types of screen sizes, processors, radio technologies, cameras, list goes on.
Some drivers are proprietary, others are open source, hence why some manufacturers are unwilling to support it, or release binaries to enable some ROM developers to build a new version
So that statement you provided is entirely misleading.
The Oneplus One uses CyanogenMod, the new version of CM based on Lollipop will be out early next month.
Quinton. What does mean for the ordinary person with a Samsung !!
Not available on galaxy s3 I am still on 4.3 version
I installed it on my Nexus 5 and Nexus 7. Had to wipe the cache partition as my battery life dropped significantly. After that though it started working great.
have your say