Barbers and hair salons will reportedly be allowed to reopen on June 29, three weeks earlier than previously planned.
There has been much speculation as to whether hairdressers and barbers will be allowed to reopen early with both An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Minister for Health Simon Harris confirming that talks were underway with industry officials over the matter.
Due to reopen on July 20th, there were hopes that a document of over 100 guidelines released by the Irish Hairdressers Federation would be enough to convince health authorities to allow salons to reopen at the end of June instead. The Irish Times reports that government sources on Wednesday night said that a decision to bring the reopening of barbers and hairdressers forward to June 29th is currently being worked on.
This comes after Varadkar’s comments on the topic yesterday morning. Speaking on 2FM he said:
Speaking on 2FM this morning, Varadkar said:
“We always said that if they went in the right direction, if cases kept falling and the number of people in hospital with COVID kept falling, we would speed up the plan.
“Working with Tony Holohan and his colleagues at NPHET, we agreed that five phases ending in the middle of August was too slow.
“We brought things into the phases starting this week, including opening more shops, than we had originally planned.
“We’re now working on revising Phases 4 and 5 so that we can have the country almost fully opened by the middle of July. The kind of thing we’re looking at, for example, is bringing forward the hairdressers and the salons and a couple of things like that.”
An extensive list of new measures have been proposed in order to ensure the health and safety of staff and customers, including the use of PPE equipment, staggered appointments and the full sanitisation of workstations after each customer.
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