The trouble with writing about Ireland at the moment is that it is increasingly difficult to convey to the reader the full scale of the insanity that is going on, while not ending up sounding like a hysteric yourself. But nonetheless, it is important, too, to record things that are true, and here’s a statement of truth:
This Government has completely failed on just about every measure of the pandemic response.
In the beginning, they failed to source PPE for our hospitals, and our nurses. They failed to protect our nursing homes. They failed, over the summer of 2020, when cases were low, to expand hospital capacity. They failed for months, at the start of the pandemic, to regulate travel from the EU. They want to regulate it today, of course, when the worst of the pandemic is over. Despite months of lockdown, death rates amongst the elderly in Ireland are almost identical to death rates amongst the elderly in countries that didn’t lock down at all.
They failed to source enough vaccines, and soon enough. They have kept the country in level five lockdown for five consecutive months. In the rest of the world, life is getting back to normal. In Ireland, the Government is frozen in fear. In January, when all was going to hell in a handbasket, the Minister for Health’s main concern was how often his name was being tweeted. They have criminalised priests for saying mass and banned the elderly from seeing their grandchildren. They have locked up the child of a dying man, even though he was fully vaccinated. They have failed to develop a contact tracing system that works. They made a complete mess (how long this seems ago, now) of the leaving cert calculated grades, meaning that lots of students endured additional trauma in September.
And through it all, they slapped themselves on the back, and did the usual “best little country in the world” routine. Then they gave themselves a pay rise.
And what has all this accomplished? How much better off are you, the average Irish citizen, because of what our Governing class has done for the last year? Are you richer? Happier? Safer? Does the future feel more secure, or does it feel more uncertain?
It is important, though, to put everything into perspective. Over the weekend, hundreds and thousands of people behaved – perfectly correctly – as if there were no lockdown in Ireland at all. Video footage circulated of crowds thronging Salthill beach, and the St. Stephen’s Green Park, in Dublin. Outraged councillors posted tweets like this one, lamenting the rubbish left on the streets by night-time revellers:
Portobello last night. We have to do a whole lot better. This can’t continue, even in the short term. pic.twitter.com/KrwuDfFIH9
— James Geoghegan (@GeogheganCllr) April 25, 2021
All of this is happening, incidentally, in the face of Government laws banning most indoor and outdoor events. It is happening, too, just two days after the Government told UEFA it would not host European Championship games in Dublin on the basis that it is too dangerous for people to attend sports events.
On the same day as thousands were partying in Stephen’s Green, a Garda squad was figuratively breaking down the doors of a Catholic Church in Athlone, to break up an illegal mass. The concept of an illegal mass, of course, is not something we have seen in this country in hundreds of years.
It is barely worth, at this stage, asking about, or pointing out, the inconsistency in the policing approach. Thousands of people partying in broad daylight managed to evade the long hand of the law, while the heavy squad was sent in to stop a very small congregation from saying some prayers. It is barely worth asking, or talking about, or pointing out, by the way, because you will get no answers.
The Government’s position on Mass, is, of course, the subject of an ongoing constitutional challenge. In fact, the Government has gone to so much trouble to outlaw religious services that they have had to have three goes at it: The initial law, a clarification of their position to the courts, and then, last week, a new law that appeared to ban weddings, as well as other religious services. Nonetheless, that gives you an idea of how much a priority it has been to keep people out of church, for reasons that have no globally accepted basis in science. No other country in the world, it is worth recalling, takes the Irish approach to religious services and Covid. Ireland is the only place on earth you will find the police entering a church to break up a religious service.
The only place on earth.
Why is that? This is about much more than just mass, of course. It’s about the whole approach the Irish take to politics. In the tweet above, a Fine Gael Dublin City Councillor complains about rubbish being strewn on the street, and blames the public. He’s right, of course, that littering is bad, but he’s not a member of the public: He’s a City Councillor from the Governing party, which has banned beer gardens and pubs from opening, forcing people out onto the streets. He’s a member of the city council, which is responsible for providing bins and public toilets.
And yet, there he is, blaming the public for three failures of Government, and telling us that we’re the ones who have to do better.
Why do we put up with this abuse? Because it is, make no mistake, abuse. This is where the opening line above about “not sounding like a hysteric” comes in, but it is important to call things what they are.
Perhaps it is because the Irish people have an institutional memory of being an abused people that we tolerate this. Perhaps, even a hundred years on, the novelty of having our own Government is still more important to us than having a good government. Perhaps we are like the young lad given a 2009-reg Fiat Punto, who doesn’t care that it’s a box of scrap because it’s his box of scrap. Perhaps it’s that anybody with talent and ambition in Ireland emigrates.
All of this, by the way, without saying a word about the Irish media, which has supplicated itself before the Government for the last year and a half; or Ireland’s armada of taxpayer funded NGOs, who seem to get hundreds of millions of taxpayer euros to do nothing except call on other people to do things; or even the non-covid elements of how we’re governed.
This is a country, after all, that has bankrupted itself twice in my less than four-decade lifetime, and is on course to bankrupt itself a third time. We have crises in housing, health, crime, mental health, and looming catastrophes in pension provision and national debt. And still, of course, Ireland’s elite will smugly go on television and tell you that they know best.
And what is the Government doing? Last week, we had an amnesty for illegal immigrants, proposals for hate speech laws, calls for gender quotas in politics, and a big row about Sinn Fein collecting data on voters. If you reject all of this as nonsense, then they’ll call you far-right and a conspiracy theorist.
It’s no wonder, then, that they’re so worried about the growth of the far right, and conspiracy theorists.