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.
The simple fact of the matter is this: We tried to stop covid. We failed, comprehensively and totally. We spent billions of euro in the course of that failure. It is over, and done with.
Tony Holohan is running the country, on Covid, because Micheál Martin will not. He does not want to. He does not know how to. The strategy, from day one, has been to let NPHET handle it, and hope that Government will take the credit, and Holohan the blame.
The Taoiseach, asked about an Austrian lockdown for the unvaccinated, did not quite rule it out. Therefore, a journalist can quite honestly write a piece saying “Taoiseach refuses to rule out lockdown for the unvaccinated”.
EU Statistics show that Ireland has 278 hospital beds for every 100,000 people. Poland, a much poorer country, has 473 beds for every 100,000 people. Bulgaria has 624 such beds, for every 100,000 people.