Covid 19 Part XXV-44,159 ROI (1,830 deaths) 21,898 NI (598 deaths) (13/10) Read OP

Jinglejangle69 wrote: »

They put the country into a state of panic Sunday might without consulting anyone in government.

Someone needed to pull them up on that.

I would tend to agree that they handled the communication extremely poorly. There was some degree of panic buying after that announcement and for example, I had to deal with an elderly relative who was on the phone crying her eyes out saying that she’ll never see anyone again and she didn’t know how to cope and the whole place will be back to lockdown and she won’t be allowed out.

These decisions aren’t without pretty serious impacts and they need to be taken with an understanding of that.

They’re advisors, not policy makers and they need to ensure they remain within their remit and brief the policy makers. They can and should publish that advice but not before they’ve briefed.

There are a lot of other considerations: economic, social, communication and political. They don’t go away in any situation be it a pandemic or even a war. You’re always working within an envelope and everything you do has consequences for some other areas of life.

Announcing that as it was done in the leak also fed a whole load of conspiracy theorists online because the communication wasn’t handled at all. They already imagine we’re line in an authoritarian state and that leak was just food for their fantasies.

Throwing around statements like that is a way of causing people to end up confused, ignoring messages or even destabilising the whole COVID-19 management strategy.

Political Communication is always a delicate two-way process, particularly in a crisis.
We need to have policies that people want to be on board with and also Irish political processes work by consent of the public and consensus building. We can’t just rollout draconian stuff like some places with far more authoritarian states, even compared to many democracies we have a very weak executive based on consensus forming, an unusually casual relationship with police and policing and the vast majority of what we do is leadership by consent, finding consensus and it has to be publicly accepted. You can’t just drive a bulldozer through politics here and that should be seen a huge strength, not a weakness.

If you want to turn the lockdown measures into a push back like water charges, arbitrary actions and out of the the blue announcements about lockdowns are how to cause that.

Obviously we have to get the virus under control and obviously we aren’t doing enough to achieve this in quite a few areas, but I think we also need to realise we aren’t China, we aren’t even France or Spain. The strength here is in voluntary cooperation when everyone’s on board, not top down command. There’s a huge risk in Ireland you can end up in an attempting to herd cats situation.

We could also really do with ignoring US polarised, bunker building and politicising the COVID crisis, which is something we should be looking at as a challenge to solve together, not forming into diehard anti masker idiots vs shut down everything debates.

We also have very hard limits on what we can do. If Ireland, for example, took a very draconian step into a lockdown that seemed unwarranted, we have real potential issues with funding that. Our credit lines depend on markets seeing our policies as sensible. Our economy is dependent on mobile capital and we also can’t really be a massive outlier in the EU and then, should our plan go wrong, turn around and say oops, we need a bailout.

This is going to be about finding a way to muddle though and balance risks. There is no exit strategy at present other than vaccines and if we get to the stage where there’s a reliable treatment regimen that renders the risk acceptably low. We aren’t there yet but we will get there.

In the meantime we all need to take the sane, sensible steps and that means as a society we need to stop tolerating people taking the absolute piss with very blatantly obvious high risk activities. Don’t attend parties. Keep your socialising low volume and take the precautions on board - keep your distance, wash your hands etc

I would actually think it might be sensible at this stage to treat towns and cities as you would a shopping centre and wear masks in shopping areas and so on too. It’s worked in Germany. It would work here.

Anyway, this post is getting too long, so I’ll stop!

I just think we all need to take a long, hard look at ourselves and calm down. This isn’t the time to pick political battles and this isn’t the USA (thankfully in this case). We have a very different way of doing politics and we can achieve a lot if we work together.

blowitupref wrote: »

Last two weeks. Leitrim 10 cases, Carlow 25, Sligo 42, Mayo 44,Waterford 34,Kilkenny 42,Laois 75,Kerry 77, Tipperary 73, Westmeath 61,Wexford 71.

Any view from posters from those counties on getting lumped into level 3? Worth pointing out in the three hospitals in Connacht in Mayo, Galway, Sligo there is currently 1 person in hospital with Covid.

They mustn't have schools in these counties :cool: