We urgently need a national discussion about this which is cool, calm, balanced, and informative. There does not, at present, seem to be any prospect of us getting one.
Those pursuing Mark Humphrys do not, in truth, really care what he said, or says. What they want is to send a signal about their own views: Agree with us, or else.
We do not need polls to know that Donald Trump would be a very weak candidate against Joe Biden.
The Irish Government has no plan. It is drifting, and dithering, and waiting for Tony to tell it what to do.
The evidence would tend to suggest that “schools are safe” was always nonsense. If they were safe, after all, schools would never have been closed when they were, for as long as they were. The phrase was developed solely and only to make people feel safer about re-opening them.
The man is not the nation’s leader. He is a civil servant who has gotten – on a historic scale – far, far, too big for his boots.
“A tax on hope”, he would call it, claiming that it convinced worse off people to throw money they could not afford at tickets every week
But the conclusion is still inescapable to anybody with eyes to see: We’re in this mess in part because the vaccines are not what they were advertised to be.
Any responsible leader, writer, or activist, observing this, should be, in the words of William F. Buckley, “standing athwart history, yelling stop”.
What we’re seeing now, though, is the inexorable collapse of trust in the authorities.
Irish politics is an immensely silly business. No wonder they leave the real decisions about running the country to Dr. Holohan, and his team.
Whatever the root causes may be, and those are just two educated guesses, the public hysteria about covid is objectively a much bigger threat to the long term security and prosperity of the state than covid itself.