NI’S bubble of complacency has been burst in a terrifying way

ON Wednesday January 13, Northern Ireland discreetly passed the 1,500 marker for COVID-19 deaths. The 1,000-death point had been reached on December 1.

That’s a shocking statistic; as indeed is the pace of mortality. I say “discreetly”, because, while the Republic was building into a frenzy over its increased cases and rising daily death toll since New Year, Northern Ireland, at only a fraction of the south’s population, was outstripping it in real terms day by day.

Over the nine-day period from January 4, NI recorded 144 deaths, while the Republic notched up 141.

Guess which jurisdiction devoted blanket attention to the deepening crisis? Guess which one played deflection politics with Brexit and the transfer exam?

Important though those topics are, they shouldn’t be knocking ridiculously high death rates off the agenda, as if it’s somehow impolite or “pro-lockdown point-scoring” to mention the coffins in the corner.

More than a week after the PM’S address to the nation urging the need for a new lockdown and a strengthening of restrictions on association, movement and on retail, Northern Ireland had just bounced along as if nothing was happening.

New guidelines were lost in a maze of ambiguity and get-out clauses; bubbles popped up and burst everywhere; the macho resistance to mask-wearing gathered pace and aggression.

A frightened supermarket worker told me how a colleague ended up sprawled on the ground when a barefaced shopper rammed a trolley at her for daring to question them.

And everywhere traffic rolled along the main roads as if it was a normal rainy January.

With uncertainty everywhere, even about the distribution and efficacy of the various vaccines, coupled with the sense that while a portion of the population — mugs, like me — will adhere to restrictions and mask advice diligently, others will just take advantage of our caution to barge on, barking in the aisles and getting too close in the queues in the carparks regardless.

But for once, none of that is the point. Can we really absorb 1,500-plus needless deaths as if they are some kind of awkward and misleading stat?

Are we really prepared to consign the vast majority of those people to anonymity, their bereaved families to silence?

After all, there is no shame in COVID-19 — why, then, are its victims and its survivors somehow “off the record” when it comes to acknowledgement?

Do we have really have to ignore COVID-19 deaths with the same sleight-of-hand we do victims of the Troubles?

If we don’t talk about them or acknowledge them, then they don’t exist and, by extension, the Troubles on the one hand didn’t happen and the mismanagement of the pandemic didn’t happen either? We need to start taking account of the many tragedies in our midst.

Not least because, in large part, these recent horrific milestones have been caused directly by the carelessness, wilfulness, bolshiness, crassness and selfishness of so many of our population, who decided not to do the right thing.

A few moments’ silence, somewhere, wouldn’t go amiss.

Maybe all those callers on phone-in shows talking about how they’re not at risk and the rules shouldn’t apply to them would be a good start.

‘Can we really absorb 1,500-plus deaths as if they were some misleading stat?’