A Wexford primary school Principal says they are gearing up to be closed beyond the Christmas break due to COVID.
It's as schools only yesterday received advice from the Department of Education on the procurement of Air Filtration systems for classrooms, as the Christmas break rapidly approaches.
It gives schools a short window in which to bring in an engineer and purchase the correct equipment for their respective classrooms, before kids return to education on January 6th.
While the majority of Primary school children will only be receiving their first dose of the vaccine on January 10th.
Eamon Codd of the Mercy School in Wexford says schools won't be able to get the systems in place in time.
"I wouldn't imagine it will be possible. If you have 4,000 Primary Schools, it's highly unlikely that everyone's going to have something put in by that type of time frame.
"If things are going to be as negative as it potentially could be, then schools might be shut for a period after Christmas."
There have been calls to close schools for the half-week in order to break the chain of transmission, with class sizes expected to be halved in some cases.
Speaking to Beat News, Eamonn Codd of the Mercy School in Wexford says they're expecting the same.
"I wouldn't be surprised if next week people decide for the two and a half days to keep their kids at home and try and insulate Christmas for families.
"From the Government's point of view, if they had closed from Monday to Wednesday, it would be very hard to re-open in January.
"So they're going to keep us open for the next three days, and then hope we'll be back open in January."
Criticism has also been levelled at the changes made to contact tracing made at the end of September, which took away the obligation for close contacts of positive cases to restrict their movements.
Codd says the old system caught more cases:
"In the first few weeks we did have a couple of cases and things were suppressed with having the contact tracing,
"(Now) Kids have had no symptoms, have done the antigen tests, and then a number of days later have developed symptoms and then have had positive PCR tests.
"If the older system was there, that would have reduced the chances of that happening."
