Covid 19 Part XXXV-956,720 ROI (5,952 deaths) 452,946 NI (3,002 deaths) (08/01) Read OP

Will be genuinely surprised if that happens

It really needs to get to the point where if you're supporting this charade and this NPHET political entity, you need to be seen as supporting mass unemployment, non payment of bills/mortgages, and mass broken homes and families.

I don't see anything else getting through to the I'm so scared/restrictions until covid magically disappears crowd.

I'm getting seriously concerned about the lack of coherent messaging coming from Government. They are all over the place on it and they're going to confuse people and lose the room.

1. Be clear about why the restrictions are emerging and don't patronise people. If they're there as a temporary precaution due to omicron be very clear about that. If they're about reducing overall numbers of infections, also be clear about that - do not mix messaging and do not lecture people. They're very willing to lend a hand and pull together, but there's no need for this 1980s school principal style tone.
2. Policies should be CLEAR, CONCISE, FACTS LED and CONSISTENT and not sound like the cabinet and its advisors all have completely different takes on what's going on.
3. Stop dogmatically repeating that 'schools are safe ... schools are safe ... schools are safe' without doing something to make the the case and showing strong evidence - i.e. working on the air quality in classrooms. People aren't fools and they're beginning to look like some of the ministers and leadership are just parroting the same nonsense over and over. It's also way out of step with comparable countries and we know that.
4. Get the vaccine systems flowing properly. Reopen the web portal, let people register for boosters, get things feeling like there's a process in place. Do not have thousands of people turning up at walk-in centres to queue for hours. It's unnecessary and it will cause annoyance. Also issue updated certs.
5. Get the messaging right about the vaccines. People don't seem to know what cohort is doing what when anymore. It's totally unclear.
6. Create ONE website for all things government covid messaging related. Do not continue to have information scattered across multiple site, often in dense text and often also extremely out of date. It needs to be something like "COVID.GOV.IE" and that should have everything up-to-date, all the latest news, regulations, access to statistical portals, vaccine registration, health and advice (in English, Irish and multiple commonly spoken languages of other communities here) and it should be tightly managed, easy to navigate and look slick.

In France the certs are not required for hotel accommodation, take-out or room service on the basis that hotel accommodation might be an essential service and France has a far more draconian approach to this overall. They are required for hospitality within the hotel i.e. bar, restaurant, cafe etc service.

I'd give a lot of credit for the scale of rollout of the first and second dose vaccines, and that was handled by a specific Vaccine Task Force which needs to be reassembled immediately.

As for the rest of it ... some restrictions were and might be necessary, but they need to be extremely science led and justified. I am getting a bit fed up with these arbitrary nonsense type measures and then total blindness to measures like school air hygiene that is blatantly obviously missing. Ireland's not unique in that either, I've seen similar in the UK and France by times.

The utter crazies on the fringes have not helped any kind of nuanced debate going around roaring about conspiracy theories. In fact, I think they've done a huge disservice to their being any kind of nuanced debate on measures because it allowed anyone critiquing anything to be thrown into the 'oh one of them lot...' category. It was understandable to a degree during the worst and most unpredictable phase of the pandemic as without the vaccines in place, it was a genuinely catastrophic situation and had been in numerous comparable places, but we have been vaccinated and also have far more of a sense of how this behaves now and we need to be able to debate the nuances much more than we had to date.

The positives I see at the moment are again mostly vaccine related. The very high vaccination rate and the targeted booster campaign has us in a totally different position to Christmas 2020 or to many of our continental neighbours experiencing difficulties too. Case rates are too high, but we should be able to curb them with pretty minor tweaks here and there.