Relative obscurity should be the default setting for the Government’s medical advisors. We need to know that they are there in a crisis, but we also need to have the confidence to know that a crisis will pass.
The problem is what we tolerate as a country, repeatedly.
What value, in other words, do we get from RTE? In my own case, and I sorely doubt I am alone, the answer is none.
Yes, the Government could ignore NPHET, on paper. But why would they?
What we have in Ireland is a plainly political lockdown, not a scientific one.
Under President Trump, bad news for the American President was regularly amongst the top stories in Ireland. Under President Biden, who has just had one of the worst weeks in living memory for an American President, such news struggles to make it into the top twenty stories in the Irish media.
It strains credulity to believe that the hospital situation changed so markedly in just two weeks.
This has not been an opportunity for a “national conversation”. It has been an opportunity for one group of people to do what they always want to do: Tell everyone else to sit down and shut up and listen to what they have to say and accept it as gospel truth.
For most of yesterday, the name of the person who was wrongly suspected of carrying out the unprovoked and brutal murder of Ashling Murphy was not made public by the Gardai. All that we knew is that he was male, in his forties, originally from Romania, and was known to Gardai. And, of course, that […]
Most people in Monaghan, I suspect, will see right through it.
In most of the rest of the English speaking world, the definition of an incidental case is “somebody who was admitted to hospital for a reason other than covid 19”. In Ireland, the definition is different.
In other words, you can move around freely, but only if it is in a good cause.