A parish priest has defended staging regular Sunday morning masses during the Covid-19 lockdown saying that no person has got the virus from attending.

Fr Willie Cummins, parish priest of Ennistymon, was speaking Sunday after 48 people attended 11am mass at the local Catholic church in the north Clare town.

There was one person in each row separated by two rows to the next person with the vast majority of mass goers wearing facemasks.

Fr Cummins has been saying mass publicly throughout the current lockdown, and he told the Irish Independent he would often have more than fifty people attending.

He told a reporter that people attending were not put at risk because of the sheer size of the building:

“Look at the size of the church. It is all sanitised and the doors are left open all day”, he said.

An Ennis man who is a regular at the 11am mass during the lockdown said he had no concerns over his health: “I’ve no worries. Absolutely none. It is a big church. We are all socially distant from each other. I never had a moment’s worry and I would have underlying conditions but I never had any concern in here. None whatsoever.”

The most recent Covid-19 figures for the north Clare electoral area that contains Ennistymon show it has one of the lowest Covid-19 rates in the country with fewer than five cases in the most recently fortnightly period to May 3.