We need to be able to trust that our leaders are not hiding answers to diff icult questions

WITH the recent good weather, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the call of spring. Typically, of a clement Easter weekend, we would be spending time with friends and family. Grandparents would get to dote on their grandchildren, spoiling them with Easter eggs. We would all get to enjoy the ordinary pleasures of Bank Holiday Irish life – trips to the beach, a sporting fixture, a lamb barbecue, or a pint of plain with friends.

Our lives, in the course of a few weeks, have changed beyond recognition and these once mundane pleasures now seem exotic. So while none of us should be amazed by the three-week extension to the lockdown, we can understandably be taken aback.

We remain committed to our civic duty to help contain the spread of Covid-19. We have not, however, abandoned our critical faculties. A government that was on its way out may enjoy goodwill but we still need a longer-term government to take decisions with a view to the public health and economic prosperity of the country over the coming years.

Our leaders are undoubtedly doing their best under difficult circumstances but that does not mean we can row back from difficult questions about this crisis.

Questions such as how many people have died in nursing homes – 156, a shocking figure which only emerged on Friday evening after two weeks of questions from this newspaper. Similarly there are issues with the suitability of personal protective equipment for frontline staff, bought with much fanfare from China but a significant amount of which is useless.

There were difficult realities revealed this week also about the economic cost the country is facing. Around 2,000 Debenhams workers were told their jobs are gone, and 507,000 in total will receive the emergency Covid-19 payment while they are furloughed, at a cost of €5bn for just three months.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the International Monetary Fund delivered dire warnings about what the future holds, and predicted a new decade of austerity.

This price is worth paying to help keep the rate of infection below that with which our health system can cope. But it requires real leadership and transparent communication to ensure people understand why the cure is not worse than the disease.

This weekend, and for the duration of the lockdown, we will stay indoors and maintain the recommended two-metre social distance from others, and while An Garda Síochána has been given sweeping new powers, we don’t follow the law out of fear of arrest and prosecution. While there is substantial goodwill towards

Leo Varadkar’s Government, we don’t support it because we are servile. Nor do we labour under the illusion that the HSE, for all the heroic efforts of its staff during this crisis, has suddenly become a model of efficiency and competence.

We are doing this for each other in the greatest act of community any of us has ever seen. We are doing it for our parents, our children, our extended families, our friends and our neighbours, to minimise the numbers who will die from this virus.

We are doing it so that next year, and in all the years to come, we will visit that beach,enjoy that match, smell that barbecue smoke – and relish those pints of plain with those friends we kept alive.