Over the weekend, 140,000 fans poured into the Red Bull Ring, in Spielberg, Austria, to watch the Formula One Austrian Grand Prix. Tens of thousands watched England defeat Ukraine in Rome, in the European Championships. Across the continent, crowds poured into bars, restaurants, and sporting events.
Meanwhile, in Ireland:
A pilot music festival is taking place in Dublin this evening as part of efforts to test the safe return to large events, and antigen testing is being used for entry | https://t.co/Mo2rwiW5m1 pic.twitter.com/W5lNUAG9l5
— RTÉ News (@rtenews) July 3, 2021
The Authorities were very keen to make the “pilot festival” a great success. To the extent that they instructed attendees to take to social media to tell the world what a “great time” they were having:
Lol pic.twitter.com/iERcDmpuQv
— Dave Hanratty (@HanrattyDave) July 3, 2021
And of course, amongst the acts, a bit of protest was tolerated. So long as it was a protest against an Italian fellow who has been dead for more than 500 years:
It’s @DeniseChaila ⚡️
(the back says “stop romanticising genocide”) pic.twitter.com/C32TNda3ZM
— Maria Flannery (@mariaflan) July 3, 2021
The whole thing is a remarkable insight into the bizarre approach that Ireland is taking to the pandemic. Here we are, in July 2021, organising “pilot” outdoor events, months after the Irish Government’s own science has made clear that outdoors is perfectly safe. Here we are, piloting antigen testing, months after every other country.
Even at that, and even with the tests and the science, we still did not consider it safe to allow people to mingle freely, instead demanding that they be corralled into pens like sheep or cattle awaiting sale or slaughter.
Incidentally, why is it described as a pilot event? A pilot for what?
A pilot is usually a trial run for something you intend to do more regularly. Most tv series have a pilot episode, for example, to test whether the audience likes the characters, before commissioning a whole season. A successful pilot, in other words, will be widely repeated. Is there a plan to make this….. a regular thing?
Because that will not work for anybody. Music festivals and other large outdoor gatherings work on the basis of scale. Because you have lots of people there, everybody can make money: The bands, the organisers, the people who sell the crappy hot-dogs and warm beer. All of it works on the basis of lots of people in the same spot, eager to spend some money. This pilot event, on the other hand, cannot have made money, or been designed to do so. So what is it a pilot for? The Electric Picnic, for example, will never be organised on this basis.
Sooner or later, some element of that farce will have to be ditched, if normal life is to return. This event seems to have been organised to see if such events can be held safely – but it is entirely useless in that respect, since nobody is going to want to organise, at least in the private sector, events that work that way. For it to have been a genuinely useful pilot event, they should have allowed people to mingle freely on condition that they were tested going in, and then tested again a week later to see if they had caught covid. That might at least have told us something about the danger or safety of such events.
But it would also have required common sense, and that left the building some time ago. The real reason this thing was organised was to give the department of tourism something to do, and to give the Government a little PR boost. It also probably boosts morale for those poor blighted souls who are completely enthralled by the NPHET narrative, and want to see something that looks mildly like progress so that they can feel a little bit less uneasy, looking at the rest of the world. As an epidemiological exercise, though, it was completely worthless.