John Kiely says that parents in particular must buy into the social distancing measures to slow the spread of coronavirus.
The Limerick hurling boss is the principal at Abbey CBS in Tipperary town which, like every school, university and creche in the country, was shut down on Thursday last until March 29 in a bid to contain COVID-19.
While fully backing the measures, Kiely told Live 95fm: “Parents need to take responsibility for where their kids are during the course of the day now during the course of this event.
“It may sound harsh for me to say that but that’s the reality of it.
“The reason the children were kept off from school was so that they would go home and they wouldn’t be interacting with each other, wouldn’t be interacting with their grandparents, wouldn’t be interacting with other colleagues in school who might have underlying conditions that might put them in a compromised position, staff members who might have underlying conditions.
“It’s there to slow down the spread of the disease to make sure that we don’t end up with a big number of people hitting our hospitals in serious condition where we don’t have enough ICU beds and HDU beds for them to be treated in and that’s the situation they find themselves in in Italy.
“We can see all the videos coming out of Italy where they’re absolutely in total lockdown, people aren’t leaving their apartments, their houses, they’re not in the streets, they’re not going to restaurants, they’re not going to bars, they’re not going to work, they’re not doing anything because they’ve seen the rough of the stick.
“They’ve seen huge numbers of fatalities, huge numbers of cases and they’re having to ration health care and that’s not a place we want to be.”
