Why Covid loves Ireland.
I’m really starting to hate writing about Covid, but here we are.
In the space of months Ireland went from hundred of daily cases, to single digits, to now (as of today) a little over 6,000 cases. We went from being the poster boy of the EU for handling Covid to now, even with vaccines being administered, bordering on a crisis. Major hospitals are stripping back non-urgent appointments to cope with this massive influx of Covid cases they’re expecting. We’re projected to reach 7,000 daily cases.
How did this happen? Well for once I’m not going to (entirely) blame the Irish government. It all comes down to the Ireland’s secret superpower/weakness;
We are a extremely reactionary country!
We will drag our feet on everything and have left so many things until the last minute.
Doctors and nurses have been striking for better pay and better resources for years. Tenants have been pleading for an end to zero-hour contracts and abusive landlords. The Gaeltacht and the Irish language have suffered from decades of apathy and indecision. The Mahon Tribunal, investigating allegations of political corruption from the likes of former Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern, took 15 years! We even tried to refuse unpaid taxes from Apple that was practically handed to us by the EU.
We have never been a country that’s acted swiftly or with confidence. This has been more than evident from our handling of Covid; from phasing out of lockdown restrictions before numbers lowered to cases we can handle, to ignoring NPHET’s advice to return to lockdown back in September, to even ignoring the warning signs that lifting restrictions to encourage people to shop during the Christmas season would result in thousands of daily cases (a projection we’ve blown passed).
Even the public have been slow to react; slow to adopt masks, slow to take the virus serious, and slower still to realise they are helping it spread.
We will wait until the last minute to do something, convinced all the while we can give a cheeky wink and a wry smile and live up to our Cracker Paddy stereotype with gleeful pride.
Even anecdotally, while I was studying film in college (yes, I am unemployed, talks for asking), the focus was on what the French or British were doing, encouraged to imitate them, even if it conflicted with our own culture and experiences, resulting in a lot of short black-and-white student films that could easily be mistaken for parodies of obscure Polish Art-House pieces.
Where has this reactionary attitude come from? Our lack of self-confidence as a country largely stems from our colonised past at the hands of the British, appealing for support from our friends in the States and the EU for our economies and employment to the point where the 12.5% corporate tax rate we offer is still an awkward conversation we wish to avoid, like the smallest member of a gang being bullied by the others but is just happy to be included.
We have a habit of looking outside of Ireland for approval. We holiday in Spain and Turkey. We work in Australia and Dubai. We lobby Washington and Brussels. We’re like an abused child, looking for external vices to fix our internal problems.
Every decision we’ve made to combat Covid has been made with appeals to follow the trend. Reluctance to go back into lockdown was excused with “no where else in Europe is doing it”. Sweden and England’s disastrous “herd immunity” approaches were given serious consideration. Had the results on those experiments been even slightly delayed, there’s no doubt we would have happily followed them because the big boys were doing it.
And now we’re here, possibly too little too late. We went back into our third lockdown on the first of January. On the 29th of December however we broke our record for daily cases set back in March (1,545 and 1,515 respectively). 2% of the country has contracted Covid in the space of less than a year, with the number set to only increase.
I’m not worried about this.
I’m worried about how bad things need to get before we change.
It took executions for Ireland to revolt against the British. It took for children to be raped and buried in mass graves to sever ties between the state and church. It took for every bank in the country to be on the brink of failure for them to be bailed out, plunging Ireland back into a second-world country. It took homeless people freezing to death at the steps of the government for people to care about the homeless crisis. It took a dead kid washing ashore on a beach for people to care about the migrant crisis.
What will it take for Ireland to stop spreading a virus? A virus that has already mutated into a faster variant of itself… one that’s been shown to have a stronger effect on children.
What will it take? I hope we never find out.
