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

He set up a PR stunt “Freedom Day” during the Delta wave and then had to roll back on tons of his promises because he’s a tabloid journalist by nature.

You don’t make promises to end things that you can’t possibly know the outcome of.

Omicron would appear to be an entirely different scenario and it makes sense that we are likely to ditch whatever remaining restrictions we have.

If we can’t get hospitality, food and entertainment venues back we should be doing it as soon as is practical, but don’t go down the road of calling it some PR b/s tabloid hype nonsense.

If omicron is genuinely heading towards a positive outcome, and it looks very promising at this stage, we also need to start seeing some of that positivity and I think we are doing.

You’ll always get people who are glass half empty vs glass half full and in a scenario like this you’ll also get people who will be struggling to take any risks at all. That’s also just the reality of human behaviour. The challenge is to ensure we find some kind of pragmatic middle path that isn’t stupidly reckless but that also isn’t leaving us in some kind of fearful paralysis that we end up being far too slow.

I don’t think you can really compare now with last summer as we were dealing with a far more deadly issue back then and also vaccines were still rolling out. That’s not the case anymore.

The key thing is we need to actually learn from what just happened and treat the reform of healthcare as a very serious priority, and drive it though, even if it ruffles some feathers and upsets some status quo messes.

We got through this by the skin of our teeth and we were a lot more precariously exposed that we should have been given the resources we have and that has probably cost us billions. That’s the reality of it.

We need to also get a very much clearer picture of what we are actually spending on health, whether some aspects have hugely inflated costs, whether they’re totally inefficient and and also whether it is actually health spending at all. I mean there was a study a while back showing Ireland classified a huge amount of non healthcare depending, mostly social care and related spend into the health budget, which means we are possibly not even comparing like with like when we look at what we are spending vs other countries.

All I’m saying is if we haven’t learnt a hard lesson from this, we are doomed.

I also think that by and large, the vast, vast majority of the Irish population have been phenomenally good at dealing with a crisis. There has been a cool, calm, community spirited, good humoured, facts based, very logical pragmatism that isn’t something that’s been seen in a lot of other countries and it says something for our cohesiveness and we need to recognise it and it’s been across the spectrum of political persuasions and everything else too.

We need to hear some of the positives in this and I think sometimes aspects of the media have been way too depressing. There’s been amazing stuff going on throughout the pandemic.

It's more transmissible now. We wouldn't have had 25K cases back then. And nobody had a problem with lockdown in April 2020 anyways.

Interesting that you've gone back almost 2 years to make a point though.

The reality is, we had completely unnecessary heavy restrictions in place for all of 2021 when it simply wasn't necessary. It achieved nothing but cost a lot. And now we're talking about summer again...

Octopod, why does 'the science' (one hears constant talk of 'the science', which presumably means there's only one single science) in England say that 80,000 people can sit in a football stadium, but 40 minutes away in the Republic of Ireland the same science (remember, it's 'the science') says that only 5,000 can (or whatever it is, I don't follow the Irish news and get my info from here)?

And what amazing stuff has gone on?