The travel advice issued by the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) aims to assist Irish citizens in making well-informed choices when organising trips overseas, the three key items to always verify prior to departure include the expiry date on your passport, whether your travel insurance covers the destination country, and the DFA’s latest country-specific travel guidance.
The DFA applies four distinct categories to evaluate travel advice for different nations, reports The Mirror. these include ‘Normal Precautions’ (indicating a security situation comparable to Ireland’s); ‘High Degree of Caution’ (where extra risks exist such as significant crime and/or terrorism, deliberate targeting of foreigners, outbreaks of disease, or severe weather); ‘Avoid Non Essential Travel’ (advising against all trips except those that are essential owing to grave dangers from crime, political instability, natural disasters, terrorism, or armed conflict); and ‘Do Not Travel’ (the most serious alert, applied in cases of armed conflict, natural disaster, disease, civil disorder, or other threats to life).
The countries currently placed by the DFA on the ‘Avoid Non Essential Travel’ list are: Bahrain; Cameroon; Chad; Cuba; Ecuador; Eritrea; Gabon; Guinea-Bissau; Jordan; Kuwait; Lebanon; Mauritania; Nigeria; North Korea; Qatar; Saudi Arabia and UAE.
The nations now listed under the DFA’s ‘Do Not Travel’ advisory are: Afghanistan, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Myanmar/Burma, Niger, Palestine, Russia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Yemen, reports The Mirror.
For any Irish citizen who happens to be located in a ‘Do Not Travel’ area the DFA’s recommendation remains straightforward: your personal safety remains your own responsibility and you ought to make every effort to depart the country while commercial transport options are still operating, you should also set up reliable contact with the closest Irish Embassy or Consulate, if that local mission is shut down or unreachable then dial the Consular Assistance Unit in Dublin on +353 1 408 2000 as they operate around the clock.
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