Conflicting regulations prove we’re not all in this together

No, we are not all in this together – and we haven’t been for some time. What we have seen in the past year has been social engineering on a vast scale – but done on the fly and with no consistency.

So we have a system of mandatory hotel quarantine that proposed to put people who were fully vaccinated in a hotel for two weeks. If they refused to go, or absconded, they were liable to criminal sanction.

And at almost the same time we had hundreds of people congregating and partying on a beach in Salthill when the weather got hot. No arrests, according to reports in the paper.

Many of the rules have been arbitrary. The prohibition on religious services has made little sense.

People going to Mass on a Sunday morning are hardly going to crowd into the sacristy afterwards and go on the lash. So, while it’s okay to pack people into supermarkets or onto the promenade, it’s not so for churches?

The Government was so spooked by the meteoric rise in cases over Christmas and January that it has been paralysed from taking any action. Everything it has done has been conservative, or with an ‘abundance of caution’.

In other words, too timid to take a chance.

You can’t blame them on one level. They departed from NPHET to give people a ‘normal Christmas’. Everybody knew that would lead to a spike. What they didn’t know then, but do know now, that the people coming back in from the UK would take a new variant of the virus with them that was up to 70 per cent more transmissible.

‘Normal Christmas’ meant a lot of booze and a licence to let your guard down. A lot of people duly obliged and the numbers, and hospitalisation, and ICU admissions, and deaths, all rose alarmingly in January.

We went in the space of a week from having one of the lowest figures in Europe to having the highest. Since then, we have seen the same shocking phenomenon occur across the EU.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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