Comparing how long it took Ireland to enter a lockdown with New Zealand's timing is "not valid", the country's top doctor has said.
New Zealand and its Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern have been praised for how early the country shut down to contain the spread of coronavirus.
It announced a month-long nationwide shutdown on March 23, after the total number confirmed Covid-19 cases there passed 100.
Meanwhile, the Republic of Ireland announced a full lockdown on March 27 - a time when more than 300 new cases were being reported daily.
Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan said: "The comparisons that are being drawn are not valid comparisons.
"The virus spread around the world and Europe was an epicentre of it, the southern hemisphere was not an epicentre.
"Ireland is a country with social, economic, legal, political links with all of western Europe which was an epicentre of this infection.
"That is not the experience New Zealand had. And its experience with the infection came much later than other countries.
"So direct comparisons are not valid."
Dr Holohan said the health experts believe that Ireland has done better than many of its neighbours when it comes to flattening the curve.
Speaking on RTE Radio One's Today with Sean O'Rourke, he said: "We can look at our countries in western Europe.
"If you look at the path of infection in this country, we think we have done well if not better than most countries.
"I'm also talking about countries to the west of Europe, and also when you look at the nursing home sector, that has been a challenge, if not to the same extent, a much larger extent in the countries we look at in western Europe.
"Many of those countries have done been able to suppress the infection as well as we have done in this country.
"The only way we have certainty in preventing the spread of infection to people in vulnerable groups, whether they're in nursing homes or whether they're in the community at large, is to first suppress the infection in the population at large as we did."
More than half of the country's deaths have been in nursing homes.
However, Dr Holohan insisted that visitors did not bring the virus into the facilities.
He said: "People would have picked up that infection, people who would have worked in nursing homes and that's the mechanism through which it gets into nursing homes.
"But it didn't get in through visitors and it's important that people know they're not implicitly to blame for visiting a loved one at the wrong time. It is not their fault."
