A momentous, and important, day:
Taoiseach say emergency Covid powers will expire tomorrow night. @rtenews
— David Murphy (@davidmurphyRTE) March 30, 2022
A few thoughts, in no particular order.
First, this does not really represent a victory over Covid. In truth, it represents Covid’s final victory over us.
In March 2020, Ireland, along with much of the world, declared a war on the virus. We took extraordinary measures – we shuttered schools for most of a year. We tethered people to their homes. We abolished weddings, and funerals, as we knew them. We ultimately mandated facemasks on almost everybody. Then, we spent eye watering sums on a vaccine. We fought a long culture war with ourselves about who should take the vaccine, and what to do with those who did not.
None of it, ultimately, beat Covid. As I write this, Covid cases are almost as high as they have ever been. The virus proved a very patient foe: It defeated everything thrown at it. It waited out the lockdowns, and zero covid, and vaccine efficacy, and all of those things. Like George W. Bush in Iraq, Ireland is now just resorting to printing a giant “mission accomplished” sign and hoping that nobody notices that Covid, not humans, won the war on Covid. And that it wasn’t, in the end, even a close-run thing.
Second, it represents a victory for common sense, and liberal democracy, though those are not always the same thing.
It is easy to say in retrospect that the emergency powers were a straightforwardly illiberal attack on people’s rights, but that does ignore the context of March 2020. It would be wrong to blame politicians for doing what they did in March 2020, when the footage from Italy and China suggested that Covid might be capable of killing Irish people in their hundreds of thousands. Only a fool would refuse to run for cover in sight of a Tornado, after all. There is no blame from this writer for the Government for their decision to introduce restrictions in the first place.
Where there is blame is for the fact that they endured for so long and grew, almost endlessly, in their absurdity. We have now been under emergency powers for more than two years. For all but the first four to six months of that period, it is not at all obvious that any of the anti-covid measures were based in any objective science.
We’ve succumbed, in Ireland, to a whole lot of voodoo. This became the country of nonsense like the nine-euro meal, or the fifteen-person funeral, or the endless and unconstitutional ban on religious services, or the mandatory hotel quarantine for visitors. We locked people up, remember, just for being foreigners arriving at the airport. It was a nonsense then. It was deeply illiberal. It had almost no basis in science.
Those who supported it should have the decency to be eternally mortified. Not, mind you, that they will.
Third: The great vaccine debate is unresolved. I remarked, somewhat tongue in cheek, the other day, that I had no reason to fear covid because I’ve had three vaccines. That was only half true: I have indeed had three vaccines, but, apparently, I, and everyone else like me, still needs to fear covid.
“But they result in mild illness”, says one side. And “see, you fell for big pharma lies”, says the other. The truth, best as yours truly can tell, is somewhere in the middle. At best, the vaccines were nowhere near as good as the average person believed they would be. At worst… well. Suffice to say, we should be thankful that the virus itself also seems to have gotten less potent.
But the vaccine debate is over in one way: Nonsensical vaccine passports have gone, and they will not be back. Mandatory vaccination, too, is an idea that resides with the dinosaurs in Valhalla.
If it had ever been a good idea, that passport law would still be on the books. It is not, because it achieved nothing. Once it became clear that vaccinated people can get sick, and can transmit the virus, the passports should have gone.
They endured – and this is an important lesson – for as long as they did mainly because they were seen as punishment of the unvaccinated Trollocs and Orcs in our midst. It was “revenge of the elite” stuff, and again, people should be embarrassed about it.
Fourth: For all our complaints, in Ireland, we were not the worst at handling covid, nor the best. That debate will endure forever – some people will always maintain Sweden got it right, others will remain disciples of New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern. The facts will not dissuade them either way.
But in Ireland, life is now back to normal. There are a lot of places in the world where it is not. We should be thankful for that, and grudgingly admit that our lot were by no means the worst.
Fifth: The worst fears of the most excitable proved unfounded. There are no microchips. There is not – for now, at least – any sign of a successful “great reset”. Nobody was ever forcibly vaccinated. Those who claimed that emergency powers would be permanent and “just the start” do not, at present, have a convincing case to make about their predictions.
Finally, this must never happen again.
The first few months of the lockdown were excusable. But after that, this country was governed increasingly by a culture of fear. The media played a huge part in that. We had old people and scared people living in fear of the “nightly numbers”. We had alarmist, not scientific, coverage all too often. We had unscientific laws made that claimed to tackle a problem, but which were obviously just for show. We had civil liberties trampled. We had Gardai arresting people on the beach when there was nobody else on the beach. We had people forcibly detained. We had businesses closed, and suffering.
And yes, we had suicides. Probably more than we will ever know, and certainly more than we will ever talk about. We had isolation, and mental health crises. We had deaf children who could not lip read because their peers’ faces were covered by law. We had sports cancelled.
All of this for a virus with a tiny fatality rate.
These have been long, dark, miserable years. Covid 19 bears much of the blame for that. As a society though, our own share of the blame is much, much, greater than we will ever admit to ourselves.