Stop subsidies and send us back to work

LEO Varadkar may be a badass but he’s also sitting on it instead of telling people it’s time to give up the cocoon of the Covid-19 subsidy and go back to work.

Naturally, the Taoiseach has every political reason not to be in a rush, even if every day is costing us dear.

The Covid-19 lockdown, the €350 subsidy and the sunshine has turned us into a land of Lotus eaters.

The besotted love affair with the Taoiseach will last as long as we can draw a tidy sum while getting a tan.

Leo Varadkar is madly popular because he avoids telling people hard truths.

He lacks the good authority to tell people what they need to hear rather than want to hear.

But of course the basking in the sunshine has to stop before we go broke and have to eat out of dustbins.

Half the country consists of cosy Continue Cocooners, whose swaddling rituals will stop as soon as the golf courses open.

The other half is on the handy Covid-19 subsidy, and is naturally happy to be paid not to work.

A historian from the 19th Century who arrived in a time machine would think he had found a communist utopia.

Possibly, as Marx believed — and as I once believed — that Arcadian paradise slumbers in the bosom of the future. But that time is not yet.

The State cannot sustain this sunshine vacation for much longer, nor expect some magic vaccination.

The butcher’s bill is rising to bankrupt us. Look at the reality check of the raw figures and be afraid.

Before the corona crisis, some 2.36 million people were working. Now the State supports 1.2 million, one worker in two.

The State subsidises the wage of some 427,000 workers, up to €410 a week.

The State is also paying 600,000 people a relatively generous €350 a week.

Add State support for 200,000 people on the Live Register and hundreds of thousands of public sector workers and pensioners. Billions to find. Where?

We retreated from reality in recent weeks. The country is in a Covid-19 coma, sleepwalking through Arcadia or what my father would call a fool’s paradise.

The Continue Cocooners aren’t the only ones enjoying lockdown. A burgeoning bourgeois welfare class is now joining them in a long holiday, baking banana bread, making nettle soup, playing Scrabble, surfing PornHub and tending to their allotments.

Last Friday on Newstalk, Shane Coleman talked to Dr Johan Giesecke, an architect of Sweden’s response which he called a “soft lockdown”.

Encouraged by this — modern cancer drugs don’t affect an active life — I decided to walk and talk.

Indeed I never really cocooned, believing the lockdown too restrictive on robust older people.

Accordingly, masked and gloved, I went off to ask about going back to work.

A supermarket manager said too many of his staff were calling in sick. An

SME owner said staff were demanding advanced PPE before coming back.

He introduced me to the former manager of a care facility, sipping her takeaway coffee in the sun.

She said most of her staff had left to get the €350 payment, wrongly claiming they had been let go.

Most tellingly, I met a 30-something Ross O’Carroll-Kelly type in a Leinster rugby shirt.

Expecting agreement from this private sector professional, I argued the case for reopening the economy, liberating the young, cutting back on pandemic payments.

What I got was a glassyeyed silence. When I pressed him, he shrugged and nonchalantly said: “Well, I think it’s great.”

Finally, a Dublin tradesman asked me rhetorically: “Will Paddy on €350 go back on the sites sharing four portaloos with 500 other builders for €200 a week extra? Eh?

But he still wasn’t finished. “Paddy knows evictions are illegal so he’s not too bothered paying all his rent either. He knows he’s protected by law.”

Yet who can blame human beings for being happy to draw a State subsidy and sit in the sun?

Still, the Taoiseach must now tell them hard truths for two reasons.

First, the sooner businesses are allowed get back to work the greater the chance of their survival. If left in a mummified state much longer, they won’t survive and will only add to our tax burden.

Second, as long as people are paid for staying at home, they will rationally baulk at returning to work — especially in summer.

But, of course, powerful populist forces are massing to tell us we can go on living in a fool’s paradise, in receipt of manna from heaven and without paying rent.

In all democracies, opposition parties are politicising Covid-19 for naked opportunist purposes.

Naturally, Sinn Fein is foremost here in stoking a nakedly populist fire.

In calling for a longer lockdown, and prolonging State payments, Sinn Fein once again proves how unlikely it is to act with good authority if in government.

Sinn Fein is not alone in selling a fool’s paradise. Some ultra-leftists are now urging employees not to return to work until a vaccine is developed.

Some deranged Greens even see an economic catastrophe as a means of saving the planet.

And, of course, we are always ready for our major distractor — beating up on the Brits and unionists.

Luckily, we got two reminders last week of the pluralist and real republican side of Fianna Fail.

Ruairi Brugha, professor emeritus of health and epidemiology, RCSI, of the famous Brugha dynasty that graced Fianna Fail, resisted Matt Cooper’s effort to adversely compare exit strategies of the Republic and Northern Ireland.

In a classy nod to all-island pluralism, he began his answer with an important tribute to the stance of first minister and leader of majority unionism, Arlene Foster.

“I think a lot of credit should go to Arlene Foster because the (exit) document (is) putting the health of the people of Northern Ireland in the context of the health of the people of the island.”

Micheal Martin, who has been leading the political battle for masking, also told Pat Kenny he was not one for “pillorying” other countries.

Martin’s statesmanlike decency deserved better than the lack of balance shown last Wednesday by Sarah McInerney, who has taken over Sean O’Rourke’s slot for the summer.

McInerney encouraged two of Martin’s critics, Pearse Doherty and John McGuinness, to talk about him without any balancing voice — with predictably skewed results.

McInerney referred to “newspaper” reports that Martin was so “desperate” to be Taoiseach it was clouding his judgment — a charge that mostly came, not from newspapers, but from SF Twitter trolls.

If Micheal Martin was so “desperate” to be Taoiseach, why didn’t he do a deal with Sinn Fein? In fact, Martin’s moral toughness is just what is needed in a Taoiseach.

******

Let me finish with a literal badass story. Outside the coffee shop, I noticed customers grinning about a guy in a tracksuit, sitting back to them, on a low wall, showing a lot of butt-crack.

As Leinster Rugby shirt was among them I sat on the wall beside the poor devil to tell him the bad news.

He pulled up his bottoms, blanked the gazers, and moved off, giving me a macho nod as he went — “Thanks buddy”.

‘Who can blame them for happily drawing a State subsidy to sit in the sun?’