Loose-lipped Living with Covid
YOU have to have your skates on these days if you want to get the latest on the pandemic. It was bad enough when you just had to keep up with the national radio stations, where Roderic O’Gorman might pop up to casually tell Philip Boucher-Hayes about the reopening of schools — only the most important news ever to parents — or where Stephen Donnelly might posit on Newstalk that actually the opening of the economy has not been totally taken off the table.
But now it seems if we really want to be in the know you have to tune into the regional radio stations as well. Because Micheál Martin is likely to turn up on Limerick’s Live 95FM to tell Joe Nash which primary classes will be going back on March 1 — again, pretty crucial news for lots of people. As it was reported, when Micheál Martin made the announcement that junior and senior infants and first and second class would be going back, hilariously he then said, “we will be announcing that next week”. Helen McEntee is likely to tell you on Galway Bay FM that we will get some idea of when we are likely to be vaccinated along with the revised Living with Covid plan next week. You also need to keep up with the tabloids. Because you never know when the Taoiseach might allegedly tell the Mirror that we will be locked down for another nine weeks.
The Government has been getting some flak for giving too much away, too casually, in a piecemeal fashion, on various media outings. And while it is understandable that people want to scoop their “partners” in government with news, you can’t blame the politicians entirely. In fairness to them, those of us in the media do keep badgering them for information about what’s happening next. Even interviews that are meant to be about other things, are just a precursor to saying, “Before I let you go…” or “While
I have you…” and getting down to the real juice that people want to know. So various ministers are allowed to waffle on about Ulster Bank or some other pressing matter, and everyone zones out, and then we hear a gear change, and our ears prick up because we know they’re going to be asked about the only thing that really matters in our hierarchy of things that matter — what’s going to be in ‘Living with Covid 2: This time it’s Cautious’.
Ah, Living with Covid. That quaint notion. The last Living with Covid plan, you will recall, didn’t survive even the first contact with the enemy. It was pretty much mangled by the end of the week in which it was announced. Indeed, you’d wonder if we should dare anger the gods with the hubris of a Living with Covid 2. It just seems to make the gods think, “Living, they say? We’ll show those mortals Living”.
But we can’t help it. We are nauseous from uncertainty now. We know they can’t really have a plan but we’re happy for them to pretend. They say the numbers have plateaued. The truth is we have all plateaued, and we desperately want someone to tell us that something is going to change.