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.
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.
The unspoken part of “protect the vulnerable” is, and ever has been, that there is a big chunk of society which is not vulnerable.
Here are the cold facts: Government policy forced Eddie Rockets to close. Government policy forced it to lay off staff. Even when Government policy allowed it to re-open, Government messaging continued to scare customers away.
There used to be a concept western society understood inherently: Proportionality.
20 months on, and we’re now reduced to having politicians urging citizens to root out a fifth column that threatens the national struggle.
If you’re one of the unjabbed, and awaiting a similar ruling from an Irish court, my advice is to settle in for the very long haul, unfortunately.