“It is confusing,” one minister admitted afterwards.

Another said they would be avoiding a foreign holiday this year. “I can explain it, I think, but it’s complex,” they added.

Transport Minister Eamon Ryan and Health Minister Stephen Donnelly brought their colleagues through the measures and the rationale for them. Donnelly’s predecessor, Simon Harris, arguably the Coalition’s best communicator, spoke of the need for ministers to be clear in public when they were explaining it.

The sense of optimism was palpable in both the Taoiseach’s announcement and the press conference held by the three Coalition leaders later on Friday. But privately, ministers have been given stark warnings about the serious risks involved in the approach they are pursuing, particularly in July.

These are outlined in two documents that were presented to ministers last week. On Thursday, the Cabinet’s sub-committee on Covid-19 was also given a sobering presentation by public health officials, including the CMO Dr Tony Holohan. Slides seen by the Sunday Independent outline that the country remains “vulnerable in the coming weeks as the wider population is not yet protected by vaccination”. 

While broadly endorsing the Government’s domestic reopening plans, Nphet’s assessment of risk states: “The medium-term trajectory for July and August, with greater indoor social contact, is very uncertain. [There is] still a risk of a further spike in case numbers, with a corresponding increase in hospitalisations.”

Professor Brian MacCraith, the head of the vaccine task force, was said to be positive about the jab programme despite the expected shortfall in the deliveries of the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine next month. MacCraith told senior ministers that he expects 2.5 million people to be fully vaccinated by the end of July and even that, he said, could be a conservative estimate.

But while vaccination — and full vaccination in particular — mitigates the risk of new variants, the wider Cabinet was told on Friday that a significant proportion of the population will remain unvaccinated over the months of June and July. The transmissibility and overall impact of variants remain uncertain, particularly the variant first identified in India that is now dominant in the UK.

While most of the measures announced for next month will aim to keep people outdoors, it is the resumption of indoor hospitality in July along with international travel that is a cause for concern.

The Cabinet memo warned of greater uncertainties in relation to the medium-term position and the impact of a greater level of indoor social mixing across the population.

Among the concerns highlighted to the Cabinet on Friday were that:

The reopening of indoor hospitality is a much higher risk and has been associated with high numbers of cases in previous waves of the virus.

The potential importation of cases is heightened by the return of non-essential international travel, as happened in previous waves.

There is a particular risk of importation of the so-called Indian variant from the UK.

While there are hundreds of thousands of additional vaccinations every week, there will still be a very high number of unvaccinated people who are more likely than not to engage in the more risky activities now available under the reopening plan.

Significant delays for arriving air passengers are very likely as a result of stringent additional public health checks.

While the basic ICT infrastructure is in place for producing the EU-wide Digital Covid Certificates (DCC), there will be significant challenges scaling it up, integrating it with airport systems, capturing data from private tests and linking to data not in the vaccination system such as people who have had Covid in the last nine months, as well as issues with verifying people from outside the State.

While the vaccination programme was not hit by the recent cyber attack, many of the officials working on the DCCs will be from the Department of Health and the HSE — which poses a significant risk to any project.

In summary, the Government has been told in stark terms the combined risk of resuming international travel, more indoor mixing, the growth in prevalence of a new variant, and the high number of younger people who will still be unvaccinated and are more likely to socialise in June and July could lead to a fourth wave. 

Ministers were told on Friday that it is open to the Government to reduce all of these public health and operational risks by delaying the opening of riskier activities in July so that more of the population is vaccinated and there is a longer lead-in time for the DCCs.

The Taoiseach has set up a senior officials group in his department to monitor the spread of the variant. It will report to the Cabinet sub-committee on Covid-19 on all operational and public health risks by June 12, when ministers are expected to take stock of whether they can press ahead with the reopening plans for July. A final decision will be made closer to the end of next month.

“On the one hand it feels great, on the other hand it’s a lot of reopening coming very fast,” said one Cabinet minister this weekend. “I am a little bit nervous.”

One issue ministers and officials will have to work out in the coming weeks is how to address significant delays that could arise at Dublin Airport once international travel is allowed to resume. A confidential analysis shared with the Government last week outlines how a data analyst employed by Dublin Airport Authority ran an exercise where a projected 14,000 passengers arrive into the State daily during August — a fraction of the 60,000 daily arrivals pre-pandemic.

The analysis assumes that it would take 90 seconds to process EU passengers who comply with the public health requirements and 180 seconds for compliant non-EU passengers. Presuming e-gates are reopened, spot checks on DCCs are carried out and the passenger locator form requirement is removed, the DAA data analyst estimates that approximately 700 passengers in total could be processed per hour in Terminal 1. With an estimated hourly maximum demand of up to 2,276 passengers, the analyst projects queues in excess of 10 hours building in Terminal 1 over the course of a day. This, the analysis states, will render operations in Terminal 1 unmanageable, resulting in the arrivals hall being backed up and passengers having to be held on aircraft as it will not be safe to allow them to enter the building.

This nightmare scenario could yet result in a Government rethink on allowing international travel to resume as fully as is proposed for July 19. Ministers already deferred a decision on restarting the Common Travel Area with the UK until closer to that date, given uncertainty over the variant.

The announcement on restarting aviation was partly driven by an intense lobbying campaign by the crippled sector in recent weeks, amplified by backbenchers in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. That backbench pressure did not relent last week at their respective parliamentary party meetings, where TDs lined up to criticise the guidelines for the hospitality sector.

The drumbeat for accelerated reopening has grown louder in recent weeks and shows no signs of relenting.

Within Government the focus is switching to a post-pandemic society with what one Coalition minister termed “background surveillance and defences” against the virus. This will see greater use of rapid antigen testing across society — despite the opposition of Tony Holohan.

Stephen Donnelly was briefed by officials in the NHS last week who told him the data from self-administered tests they have issued to households across England showed they pick up between 45 and 50pc of Covid-19 cases that PCR tests detect, and 80pc of people who are infectious. Encouraged by such data, Donnelly and other ministers are pressing ahead with the wider use of such tests in society including for pilot sports and cultural events next month and the reopening of schools and third-level institutions in September. 

Elsewhere, the Cabinet will on Tuesday sign off on plans to wind down pandemic supports in the fourth quarter of this year. It is now likely that either from September or October, the pandemic unemployment payment of up to €350 will be closed to new entrants. Weekly payments will then be reduced in phases. This will be similar to what was envisaged last July before the second and third waves hit, meaning the rates of payment will be gradually reduced to between €203 and €300 depending on pre-pandemic earnings.

 

The employment wage subsidy scheme will likely be retained, probably until at least the end of the year, with many returning to jobs that will still require State support to remain viable. Beyond the pandemic the fundamental concern across Government is whether the economy will bounce back.

In a speech to the Institute of Directors last week, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe noted that consumer behaviour may have fundamentally changed even after public health restrictions are removed.

He cited recent research from the PR company Edelman which detected a nervousness about returning to life as normal, even after vaccination. A survey of nearly 17,000 people across 14 territories — though not including Ireland — found that 65pc of people described themselves as still being in a “pandemic mindset”. Only 16pc felt safe flying commercial airlines, 23pc staying in hotels and 28pc dining indoors in restaurants. In each case, those tallies rose only slightly among those who had been fully vaccinated. “While we can be hopeful that the worst days of the public health crisis may be behind us, we are likely to face significant challenges as we begin to navigate the post-pandemic world,” Mr Donohoe said.

Getting to that post-pandemic world depends largely on what happens in the coming months.

Some in Government have expressed surprise that the usually cautious Micheál Martin has pressed ahead with the grand reopening.

There is a political reality that in two weeks’ time Martin will have exactly 18 months left in the office of the Taoiseach with plenty of post-pandemic priorities, namely housing, on his agenda. He has taken a risk, albeit a calculated one endorsed by public health.

Visit our Covid-19 vaccine dashboard for updates on the roll out of the vaccination program and the rate of Coronavirus cases Ireland

But as one insider observed this weekend: “It would be the end of this Government if there’s another wave.”

Visit our Covid-19 vaccine dashboard for updates on the roll out of the vaccination program and the rate of Coronavirus cases Ireland