Kevin Galvin & James Cox
There have been 349 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed by the Health Protection Surveillance Centre.
Of those 156 are in Dublin, and 70% are under 45 years of age.
In the South-East Wexford has had the highest amount of confirmed cases with 11, followed by Waterford with eight.
Tipperary have had seven newly confirmed cases, while Carlow and Kilkenny have had less than five each.
The Health Protection Surveillance Centre has today also been notified of 18 additional deaths related to COVID-19.
17 of those deaths occurred in March, and one in February.
There has been a total of 4,552 COVID-19 related deaths and 227,663* confirmed cases in Ireland.
Just under 11,000 people arrived into Dublin Airport last week.
The Department of Justice says the figure is down seven per cent on the previous week.
Nearly 6,500 Irish residents returned from abroad, which is an eight per cent drop.
Just under 4,500 non-Irish residents flew into the airport, which is down seven per cent.
Meanwhile, the Government has stopped collecting data on whether people are travelling into the State for an essential reason since early February.
Replying to a parliamentary question from the Social Democrats TD, Róisín Shortall, the Department of Health said the passenger locator form was amended and “the declaration on essential travel [is] no longer recorded”.
According to The Irish Times, figures collected for the first week in February, the last week when such information was sought from incoming passengers, show 46.3 per cent of 12,659 people claimed they were travelling for essential reasons.
Ms Shortall, the Social Democrats’ co-leader, said there was no apparent reason why passengers were no longer being asked to say if they were travelling for essential reasons.
