There have been a glut of articles in recent days and weeks looking back on the Covid 19 pandemic which gripped Ireland (and most of the western world) five years ago this week.
I look back, dear reader, on the first few weeks of that pandemic with utter shame, and more shame that I have not admitted so in public until now.
Hindsight is 20/20, as they say, but even so, in those first few weeks of hysteria, I bought it. It’s important to be accountable for that: In the beginning, for about the first six weeks or so, I was cautiously but definitively on board the lockdown train. I may have gotten off that train earlier than others, but unlike some wiser heads (like our own Laura Perrins, who rightly keeps reminding me) I got that one wrong. And I am ashamed, looking back on it.
Ultimately, we were all faced with a test in 2020, based on the imperfect and ultimately flawed information we had. For example, I wrote in late February 2020 that “the virus has a mortality rate of about 3%”. That was indeed the publicly available information at the time, but it was catastrophically wrong. The reason it was catastrophically wrong was because it was calculating the mortality rate from confirmed cases, and of course confirmed cases tended to be those who went to hospital in those first weeks with the virus.
The actual mortality rate is now calculated at somewhere around 0.4% – fractionally higher than the flu. And as we all know, mortality is highly concentrated in the very old and already very sick. Just as it is with the flu.
But even at that, the test still existed: We were asked a fundamental question about what mattered more to us – our fundamental values as a civilisation, or our lives. And almost uniformly, the western world answered with “our lives”. At the very first sign of potential trouble, far too many of us put our own lives ahead of almost every other consideration. Including, for those first weeks at least, me.
We should start with the children: We condemned a generation of children to more than a year without school. We still do not know what the consequences of that will be.
We condemned countless business owners and people who worked hard to financial ruin. Even today, many businesses are quietly shattering under the weight of repaying covid era loans and financial supports.
We cracked down, to a hysterical degree, on free speech. Dissenters were roundly silenced at every opportunity, to the degree that some national radio hosts took to recommending that families shun other family members who disagreed with them on vaccines, or lockdowns, or anything else. Those presenters and writers, in whose number I blessedly cannot be counted, still have jobs, but the hurt they caused to countless families will take years to undo. For as long as I live, I shall never regain the respect I lost for Claire Byrne and Pat Kenny, amongst countless others.
We became a hysterically totalitarian society, with Gardai taking the time to arrest and interrogate people walking by themselves on beaches, for example, for the crime of not wearing facemasks or being too far from their own home, even though those people were patently no threat to anybody.
When I think of my selfishness in those first few weeks of covid, I am ashamed. I am ashamed because frankly, I stopped thinking about others. This was the big lie that we told ourselves – that the restrictions were about helping other people.
But in truth? Lockdown didn’t really impact me. I live with just my wife and dog. We live in the countryside. We were not cooped up in an urban house, or forced to stay at home from work, or mind children who should be at school, or rely on the Government for handouts. So long as other people were keeping me safe, I could maintain the fiction that living my normal life while others suffered was patriotic. When I am on my deathbed, and I am asked what my biggest regret will be, it will be a particular family event that I missed because I was too scared to attend. That cowardice, in hindsight, makes me cringe with shame.
I took the covid vaccines when they became available. That by itself is a decision I do not regret, but I do regret maintaining in my own head and on these pages the fiction that they were effective for longer than the evidence justified that belief. A vaccine does not make a disease “milder” – that is not what it is supposed to do. It is supposed to immunize you and prevent you from getting the disease. In my life I have taken the rubella vaccine once, and never had rubella. I have taken the covid vaccine three times, and had covid at least that many times since. You can call that whatever you want, but you should not dare to call it an effective vaccine.
Our standards dropped. My standards dropped.
Now, again, hindsight is 20/20, and there are many people who reacted in far more egregious and insane ways than I did, but that is no excuse.
I confess that I once had faith in Tony Holohan, and at the beginning of the pandemic while the country still had no formal Government, I actually felt relief that this smug technocrat who seemed to know everything was effectively running the country. For a while, I effectively abolished my own belief in democracy itself. I was cured of that one fairly quickly, but that’s no excuse for the initial instinct.
By the time Uncle Tony was roaming around Dublin like a feudal lord, commanding the Gardai to arrest young people for living their lives, I opposed him. But in my own small way, I had helped to legitimise him. When he left his role, he took his state twitter account with him and tried to forge a little taxpayer funded sinecure in Trinity College Dublin. This is the kind of character I have spent my life condemning, and yet I tolerated his rule for a few weeks when I should have known better.
Once, later in the pandemic, I went to a public house and bought the €8 meal. And I wore my mask when doing so. This, of course, was not from belief in the science behind either (I was firmly off the covid train by that time) but out of simple “compliance with the rules” even as I was decrying those rules in print. I am ashamed of not having the courage of Margaret Buttimer, the cork grandma who willingly went to prison for ninety days rather than wear a mask in public. This is something I have long pledged to do in the face of tyrannical state over-reach, but when there was actual tyrannical state over-reach, I failed that test. Worse again, I did not defend Margaret Buttimer as fiercely as I should have. Margaret, if you happen to read this, I am sorry.
I thought I was doing my bit by simply writing pieces saying that the rules were nuts, when what I should have been doing was willingly being prosecuted for failure to obey them.
Ultimately, people did die of covid-19. Nothing in this piece should be read as any kind of conscious insult to their memory. We can never prove definitively that the lockdown did not save some lives, and it may well be that there are a few people walking around today who would otherwise be dead had all of us refused to mask up and stay at home.
What we can say though is that the lockdown was predicated on a fundamental lie about the nature of the disease. The vaccine was predicated on a fundamental lie about the effectiveness of the vaccine. The lockdown was maintained by openly tyrannical means. Many thousands of people suffered from it in ways it may yet take decades to unravel.
Ireland, of course, will never have a covid enquiry worthy of the name. The reason is that almost all of us failed the very tests I speak of above. There were millions and millions who failed the test, and only one Margaret Buttimer. There is only one Laura Perrins. There was only one Doctor Martin Feeley, whose brilliant career was ended shamefully by the Irish state because he questioned the figures.
When the history of the pandemic is written, it will not be written by those alive today, because almost all of us with few exceptions are coloured by having failed the test. It will be written by people who study those few years in our history as an example of when the western world lost all confidence in its own values, with consequences (political and cultural) that will continue to unfold for many years to come.
Some of us are more to blame than others, and I was far from the only offender or the worst. But still, Irish society should be held to account for its actions, me included. That will not happen, I fear, until most of us are dead. And then people will rightly note that we’re dead anyway, and we threw away our most fundamental values out of fear of that one thing that we can never stop.
There are those of you in my readership who, unlike me, did not get it wrong. And for that, I am sorry. Like too many people in the media, I let you down. And it is high time that I admitted that, and others did the same.