A similar system is place in Australia and New Zealand.
Experts are suggesting it may be time to reconsider introducing a mandatory 14 day quarantine hotel stay for people arriving into the country - similar to currently in place in Australia and New Zealand.
Professor of Health Systems at DCU Anthony Staines has said that a return to normal by March is possible, with the introduction of such a system.
''The price is quarantine for people coming in, at the airport hotel as they're doing in Australia'', he said.
''So what it says to the tourism industry is you bring in Irish visitors, the foreign visitors wont be there but at least there will be a tourist industry.
''If we have two summers on the trot where the tourism and hospitality industry are devastated, how much of it will still be here?''
Professor McConkey - head of the Department of International Health and Tropical Medicine at RCSI - also weighed in on the the topic earlier today.
Speaking to Newstalk, he said: "Restricting travel is unprecedented - that's a whole new thing we've never done. What maybe we could do is start re-profiling hotels, to allow people to do mandatory 14-day isolation.
"We can't keep up the no travel forever - we have to travel for various reasons on our little island."
He suggested that re-profiling hotels for that purpose could also help save the hotel industry over the coming months.
