More than 30,000 people were vaccinated at walk-in centres over the bank holiday weekend.

Roughly 10,000 people a day were jabbed at the temporary centres as Ireland’s vaccination rollout continues at pace.

HSE chief executive Paul Reid said he was “beyond proud” of Ireland’s young people, who showed up in droves to get vaccinated.

He tweeted: “Over 30,000 people were administered a vaccination at our walk-in centres the weekend. Outstripping our expectations by far.

“All age groups went through but this initiative makes us beyond proud of younger people. When needed, they once again showed up in numbers.”

Although the centres were set up as a temporary measure for the bank holiday weekend, the HSE’s senior operations lead for the vaccination programme, Damien McCallion, has said they may be opened again.

He told Newstalk Breakfast on Tuesday: “We’re still finalising some of the numbers coming through from some of the centres, but broadly speaking yesterday was our busiest day.

“And it was good to see over the weekend – even on Friday where we only had a small number of clinics in some of our other locations – the uptake in those areas was really, really good.

“So it’s certainly something we’ll look at again, we’ll evaluate it today.

“We’ll look at how it worked, we’ll take the feedback from the locations, we’ll also look at the people who are remaining.”

He said the centres had achieved their objective of attracting people who had not previously engaged with the vaccination programme.

Mr McCallion said: “One of the objectives of the walk-ins was to try and see whether we could attract people as well who, perhaps previously, hadn’t engaged with the programme and weren’t registered.

“And we found good uptake. Indicative numbers would suggest that nearly as close as half the people who attended the walk-in clinics over the weekend were people who hadn’t previously registered.

“There was an option for people who were registered but hadn’t yet got an appointment to come in as well.

“So overall we’re very happy with it, it was a good initiative. It has worked very well over this weekend”.

It marks another success for Ireland’s vaccination programme, after it outpaced the rollout in the UK on Saturday.

Ireland reached the figure of 72.4% of adults fully vaccinated at the weekend, while in the UK the rate was 72.1%.

Ireland has administered more than two million Covid-19 jabs in six weeks, health officials have said.

More than 1.5 million of the 2.1 million jabs were given in July.

Twenty-six centres remained open on bank holiday Monday with people able to turn up to get a vaccine without an appointment.

It represented a significant turnaround after the early stages of the vaccine programme were hit by delays associated with EU supply issues.

In the spring there was speculation the UK might even donate surplus vaccines to Ireland later in the year to help it address the shortfall.

Since then, Ireland’s rollout has accelerated significantly.

Around 73% of adults in Ireland are now fully vaccinated while 87% have received a first dose.

Almost 5.9 million jabs have been administered in total.