Chief Medical Officer, Professor Breda Smyth has encouraged people who are eligible for a Covid-19 vaccine to avail of the option in the coming weeks.
The Department of Health says that a new variant of Covid-19, known as Eris, has been detected in Ireland and is impacting health services.
It says that the latest variant, BA.2.86 has not yet been detected in Ireland, although a small number of cases have been detected in the UK, the US, and Denmark.
The variant is notable due to a high number of mutations. "Covid is still in our environment. It's still in our community and it is behaving like we would expect a virus to behave," Professor Smyth told RTÉ's News at One. "It is mutating, and it is evolving. "We’re not in a pandemic.