At this stage, it’s hard to know whether Australia is a real country, or an imaginary place invented by NPHET to make the Irish Government seem like a benevolent and kind alternative:
Fifteen rescue dogs, including 10 puppies, have been shot dead by a rural Australian council under its interpretation of coronavirus restrictions.
Bourke Shire Council in New South Wales destroyed the canines, which had been at its pound, to prevent volunteers at an animal shelter from travelling to pick them up and potentially spreading the virus.
“The council decided to take this course of action to protect its employees and community, including vulnerable Aboriginal populations, from the risk of COVID-19 transmission,” the Office of Local Government, a government watchdog, told The Sydney Morning Herald.
We haven’t quite reached the “shoot the doggies to stop the spread of covid” stage here in Ireland, as yet, thankfully. Perhaps ISAG/Zero Covid should suggest doing just that. It would make a good topic for their next interview on Claire Byrne’s morning show.
It used to be controversial to say that this pandemic has made people irrational. It should, you’d hope, no longer be so. When you reach the stage of “we should shoot this poor dog, in case somebody comes to help it, and catches covid in the process”, then you have lost all sense of reality, perspective, and compassion. One wonders what stops people applying that same thought process to people in hospitals, or nursing homes? After all, family members might come to visit them, risking lives in the process. Best just bump ‘em off now, with a shotgun, rather than take the risk.
This is an extreme example, of course, but often times, extreme examples are illustrative of a wider mentality. In this case, the mentality is clear: Stopping covid is the most important thing. Protecting a way of life, and protecting society, are much less important. There are some amongst us, walking in our midst, who would prefer an entirely sterile society where nobody ever got sick, even if it meant that we all stayed in our bedrooms 24 hours a day and had robots bring us food. We call some of those people “public health experts”.
The problem, of course, is that it is all for naught. You can slow the virus down, with vaccines. You can develop treatments. You can be cautious in your everyday life. But you absolutely cannot “eliminate” covid. Australian policy for the past year has been based on a fantasy. This is a relentlessly infectious bug, and, like the flu, we can’t seem to come up with permanent immunity to it. All we can do is perpetrate monstrous cruelties, like this one (and, it should be said, many more, like the treatment of people in nursing homes) in the name of a fantasy.
NPHET and the Irish Government do not get much credit on these pages. But it is important to recognise one thing: When the opposition were at the height of their “zero covid” high dudgeon, the Irish Government and NPHET ignored them, and refused to go down that road. It would have been very popular with the media, and large swathes of the public, to do so.
According to Sinn Fein, and the Social Democrats, it is what they would have done, had they been in office. Labour, too.
The Irish Government has made many terrible decisions during this pandemic. But they deserve everlasting credit for not embracing Zero Covid. In the coming months and years, Australia and New Zealand are going to make that obvious, time and again.
Those Irish politicians who argued for following the lads down under should be subjected to an old fashioned punishment for corn-theft: Put on a boat, and send down there as convicts. They wanted Zero Covid. Let them go in live in it.
Without their dogs, of course.