She said there have been 15 clusters with up to 40 people involved in some, with an average of two to three households linked. There is concern about the outbreaks and in the University of Limerick, where 120 students have tested positive, widespread screening has been triggered.
Meanwhile “presenteeism”, where people are going to work with symptoms, is one of the causes of workplace outbreaks, along with a lack of social distancing and staff meeting up for smoking breaks, she added.
It comes amid more signals that there will be no pardon from lockdown as all efforts are made to reopen education and resume non-Covid healthcare next month amid warnings about squandering the hard-fought gains of recent weeks which have driven down cases from 6,500 per day.
Advertiser ie - Death by wrongful humiliation - the story of Valentine Steinberger advertiser.ie - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from advertiser.ie Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Growing up in the townland of Moygara just outside Gurteen, a young Noel Cawley could hardly have imagined when waking up for 4am starts to walk the cows into the fair in Boyle that he would one day assume one of the key roles in Irish agricultural business.
Not only did he do that, however, through serving as Chief Executive of the Irish Dairy Board for 18 years and then as chairperson of Teagasc for ten years, he has also forged a reputation of one of the leading horse breeders in Europe.
The affable Sligo native, who retired from his Irish Dairy Board role in 2006, continues to retain an enthusiastic interest in all things related to his home county, though he now lives in Eadestown, where he runs the Newpark Lodge Stud.
Breeding for success - Dr Noel Cawley on combining a career with the Dairy Board and Teagasc while being a successful horse breeder independent.ie - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from independent.ie Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
BBC News
By John Murphy
image captionLondon s Spitalfields, where Irish labourers were accused of under-cutting English men
Ever since the word Brexit was first coined in 2012, issues of migration, integration and independence have dominated public debate across the UK and Ireland.
Now we have reached the centenary year of the partition of Ireland, BBC journalist Fergal Keane has looked back at the profound influence, over many centuries, of the Irish in Britain in a new BBC Radio 4 podcast.
How the Irish Shaped Britain tells a story of contradictory narratives existing in parallel.
In Scotland, historian Professor Tom Devine explains that the digging and construction by Irish navvies and their successors through the 19th and 20th centuries helped to shape the Scotland we know today.