The Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan says testing for Covid-19 needs to be considerably increased.
Speaking on Friday afternoon as the lockdown was extended until May 5, Dr Holohan said: "We need to considerably grow our testing capacity from what it is at the moment.
"It's not just testing, it's sampling, the taking of the samples, the tests, the processing in the laboratory, the contact tracing that follows from that, it's then dealing with each of the individual contacts who may need to be sampled and tested themselves in the new arrangement as part of, if you like, our management in this situation where we might be contemplating lifting restrictions and that's what we have to plan for.
"It's a considerably greater number of tests than we currently are doing.
"The HSE and Paul Reid have strengthened the team around the planning of this in recent days to try to give us as quickly as we can possibly get it, the capacity that we think we need to not only deal with what's coming through right now, because we think we're at or about the point where we think we can deal in real-time the number of cases that are currently presenting with our current case definition.
"We'll be looking to broaden and try and make that case definition more sensitive for instance, for situations that will be appropriate if we were thinking about lifting restrictions and that would mean we would need to be greatly increasing the number of people tested."
Mr Holohan added that the HSE hopes to be able provide test results either the same day or the following day once testing capacity has been ramped up.
He said this would also facilitate faster contact tracing.
The medical expert added: "If we manage to suppress this infection in the way that we are optimistic that we will but we haven't evidence that we have as yet.
"We have to be sure that we have the greatest chance of picking up and detecting new cases and moving and responding because as we change some of the measures that are in place, we really need to know if there is an increase in the number of cases resulting from any of those relaxations so we can pick that up and respond as quickly as possible."
