There’s a gated entrance to a house not too far from my lodgings which has featured two ‘planted’ Tricolours since Saint Patrick’s Day. I know I’ll be seeing a lot more of that entrance – and those flags – between now and Easter Sunday since it’s within two kilometres of our front door.
With our Intensive Care Units (ICU) approaching full capacity around the country, the Government was left with little option but to impose further limitations on our movements for at least the next two weeks.
That the announcement was made this evening was hardly surprising given the mass outbreak of idiocy that befell a significant segment of the population last weekend. The prospect of Tramore’s Prom being packed for a third successive weekend had filled a lot of Waterfordians with unavoidable nervousness.
Without the measures which come into effect from midnight tonight, hundreds of people, surely thinking they were having an original thought that no-one else was likely to have, would have been queuing up once more this Sunday for an ice cream or a bag of chips.
As is the wont of a generation whose attention span will have prevented them from reading as far as this paragraph, a lengthy queue formed outside Tesco Ardkeen following tonight’s speech by Leo Varadkar.
This is despite the fact that between now and Easter Sunday, April 12th, people will still be “permitted to shop for essential food and household goods”.
Thankfully, staff at Tesco Ardkeen, who like so many in their sector have worked under enormous pressure this past fortnight saw sense and refused entry to the line of would-be shoppers. Shops are not closing. Fact.
There is no need for everyone to rush out to shops at the same time and replicate the nonsense we witnessed in Glendalough, Tramore, Howth and so many other locations last weekend. But I suspect this appeal for sanity will fall on deaf ears at supermarkets around the country tomorrow morning.
Quite how some people would react if the messages being relayed to us by the medical experts and politicians were delivered in an alarmist manner doesn’t bear thinking about.
It’s as if a considerable swathe of the population has lost the ability to think for themselves while acting for a cause that exists beyond their own nose tip or front door.
Perhaps the next fortnight might lead to some form of intellectual course correction that will benefit this country for at least a generation. A nation with a greater social conscience and greater levels of compassion is the sort of country I want to grow old in.
That it has taken a public health emergency to catalyse an existential discussion about the future of this State and indeed this island is of course regrettable. But maybe, just maybe, we might emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic with a kinder country, a State not beholden to the vagaries of capitalism’s most unforgiving excesses, a country with a more benign economic model.
In a letter to Health Minister Simon Harris, Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan stated: “There continues to be an increasing number of clusters, many of which are in nursing home and residential care settings, and there have been 19 deaths to date, with 10 notified yesterday (26th March)…the risk of occurrence of widespread national community transmission of Covid-19 in the EU/EEA and the UK in the coming weeks is moderate if effective mitigation measures are in place, and very high if insufficient measures are in place, and the risk of (the) healthcare system capacity being exceeded in the EU/EEA and the UK in the coming weeks is considered high.”
The under investment in the ICU at University Hospital Waterford (UHW) is another long-standing service deficiency at Ardkeen. As a Model 4 hospital, UHW ought to be better staffed and be in a position to accommodate further specialties. It also ought to have an on-site helicopter pad, one of many facility deficits that my Waterford News & Star colleague Darren Skelton has doggedly highlighted for several years.
No-one but the most myopic observer would fail to acknowledge how composed and calm the Taoiseach, Tánaiste and Health Minister have been in the face of this emergency. Their efforts in recent weeks have been commendable, making the ineptitude of Fine Gael’s general election campaign an even greater mystery from this juncture.
But when we’re out the other side of this crisis – and it will end as all crises inevitably do – the governing parties (Fine Gael and Fianna Fail) will be rightly challenged over their respective records on health. More of the same simply isn’t good enough. Things have to change in how we manage our health system and they must change very, very quickly.
But that debate cannot be substantially waged or forwarded in the current environment. All that matters in Ireland right now is how physically distant we all prove to be between now and April 12th.
So if you want to demonstrate the depth of your patriotism, then keep washing your hands. And if you want to show your extended family how much you love them, then stay the hell away from them. Your country needs you. So suck it up, hunker down and remember, this is about all of us. Éire Abú.
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