Ministers accepted NIAC advice and those teenagers will likely be offered vaccine appointments from next week.
Vaccine centres will also begin offering walk-in vaccinations from this weekend.
Professor of Immunovirology at UCC Liam Fanning says parents should inform themselves on the risks and benefits of vaccination for their children:
"Humans as a species have a very hard kind of time understanding very minimal risk, in other words an event that happen very infrequently and we tend to catastrophise it a bit so I think what we need to do is have a clear public health message- these are the benefits, these are the rare risks associated with getting this particular modern medicine and let parents and guardians make their decisions based on that."
