As the country reopens w out our horizons – let us b By SHANE McGRATH
THIS does not feel like the cusp of liberty. Tantalising traces of a new dawn are not yet discernible. Tomorrow is due to be the first day of our new lives, the day when cracks of freedom emerge in the extraordinary seals placed around everyday life. But there is no feeling of imminent release sweeping through the land. People remain uncertain, impatient, fearful, exasperated: the fizzing mix of emotions that has burned inside us all since mid-March will not yet be still.
Phase 1 of the Government’s road map out of lockdown will soon begin, and the optimists see it as at least the start of a way back. It is at least some approximation of life as it once was. Nothing, though, is certain.
And after its often wretched, sometimes fatal health effects, it is the capacity of Covid-19 to spread uncertainty that has been most devastating. Little can be taken for granted now.
Every hope of better, freer days is quickly checked by the prospect of what might go wrong. A trip to a garden centre or hardware store – among the activities permitted from tomorrow – takes on a thrilling new meaning – until fear instantly rises to counter it.
What about social distancing? What if other customers are careless or inattentive or too selfish to take sensible precautions?
This need to weigh up decisions that were once instinctive is a new fact of life, but it is exhausting.
Adults drill caution into toddlers who have no feel for the world’s dangers, but the past two months have seen the grown-ups listen and learn as a bewildering new danger stalks our lives.
Old assumptions are now lurking health hazards. Two trips a day on buses and trains were once tiresome necessities. Now, the prospect of 30 minutes on a bulging commuter train, with the breath of another passenger on your cheek and your arms pinned to your sides, is unimaginable.
Just as it is simply not possible to conceive of Gaelic games or rugby resuming while social distancing is followed as gospel, so the thought of trying to wriggle on to a heaving bus or train on a wet November morning is a fantasy (albeit a dark, muggy one) according to current advice.
The country is starting to reopen, and every citizen is desperate to push out their horizons.
That yearning is, though, in constant friction with doubt.
In one of his most famous poems, TS Eliot had his narrator wonder, ‘Do I dare / Disturb the universe? / In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.’
That sentiment has never been more easily understood. We are all Prufrock now.
This indecision is a reflection of the wider uncertainty governing responses to this pandemic, which is itself inevitable given these circumstances are unprecedented in living memory.
In Ireland, the tension between staying safe and reclaiming old liberties has been heightened in recent weeks, as the political realm took more control over plotting a way out of the crisis.
For weeks, almost total control was given to public health experts, as lives were imperilled and the risk of catastrophic spread had to be mitigated.
This was logical public policy, and it was inevitable that there would be dissonance in messaging when politicians sought more input.
It was important that happened, too, though, given they are elected to govern the country in a way that prioritises the good of the people.
And finding the crucial but delicate balance between health imperatives and society’s other needs informed the publication of the road map. Even that, though, is qualified, with health officials stressing all week that we could only embark upon the first phase if data fell within acceptable limits.
This push and pull between health experts and politicians is too easily reduced in some analysis to platitudinous talk about life versus the economy, as if one had to be on one side or the other.
The fact is, of course, that co-existence is the goal.
Keeping people alive should be a first principle of every society, but doing so in a way that allows them to contribute and that benefits the greater good, too. Even the most sober medic concedes that coping as we have done since mid-March is no way to live.
Finding a way to do so is the point of the road map, which has been rather grandly described as a ‘living document’.
That is a generous interpretation of its vagueness and ambiguity, with the looseness of the plan giving the Government cover for readjustment.
There have already been demands to quicken the process, but nothing worthwhile will be achieved until people are convinced it is safe to re-engage with the world.
And that means softening the ceaseless friction between hope and fear, anticipation and doubt, optimism and uncertainty.
Because while it is other tensions that have received coverage – between doctors and politicians, and Ministers and the Opposition – the crucial one is at play inside every person, every day.
Parents desperate to let their children play with friends or return to creche are made to pause by the sickening thought of a child falling ill. Workers fearful for their jobs want to return to employment, but are made queasy thinking about how they get to and from work (and the astonishing scenes of London commuters squashed together on Tube trains this week illustrated the dangers in rushing back towards the lives we once knew).
Grandparents whose hearts ache at the memory of absent grandchildren are nonetheless terrified, knowing that the toll taken on older people by this virus can be deadly.
There is not a generation or section of society untouched by doubt today.
That is staggering, given most of the world had barely heard about this virus in January.
A friend with an aversion to shopping centres says they daydream about walking through heaving aisles now, perhaps because they know it is not something they will be able to experience for months to come.
This is the time of year when the promise of holidays sustains us. Secondary schools should be
‘Every hope is checked by what might go wrong’
preparing to wind down and primary schools filled with kids made giddy by fine weather and the thought of weeks of freedom just ahead.
Knowing laughs about the sun splitting the rocks just as the Leaving Cert students turn over the first paper of their exams are as much a staple of June as the GAA championships.
One by one, these summer certainties have been wiped away.
That has heightened the anxiety in people’s lives, as cherished guiding lights are extinguished one by one.
The world feels untethered, cut free of the moorings provided by old routines.
Hand-washing and regular sanitising will become new ones, but the wearing of masks is one more uncertain thing with which to conjure.
Tomorrow is a first move towards living with this extraordinary new threat in our world.
It is suitably tentative; even the privations of the past eight weeks fail to make the reopening of repair shops seem glamorous. Yet it is a sign of progress that should be acknowledged. Farmers’ markets and opticians and phone shops are not ordinarily the stuff of idylls, but their reopening is at least a nod to what we once knew.
What comes next is anticipated and will be debated, but it remains, to a vital extent, in our gift.
Our conduct and our vigilance remain important; we are told so every evening as the latest news from the front is relayed.
This is a battle against an enemy that may be weakening only to reemerge with a fresh fury come the autumn, or one that will never stay entirely dormant, or one that dies in higher temperatures.
It is an enemy that remains largely unknown – one more cause for doubt in these baffling days.
‘A champion is someone who gets up when he can’t,’ Jack Dempsey, a revered former heavyweight boxing champion, once said.
A little of that capacity for absorbing blows and still enduring has been required of everyone since Covid-19 closed Ireland down. The determination to troop on, in spite of it all, is a fact at which we might marvel in years to come.
It speaks to the human spirit, to courage and stubbornness and the insistence on hoping for better times to come.
They officially start tomorrow, but there will be no bunting. There is no sense of a country becoming demob happy as it waits to be discharged from a gruelling spell of national service.
Sporadic reports of some among us breaching guidelines and holding parties prompt exasperation, but they have been rare instances of idiocy.
The general attitude has been generous and responsible – and helped by the fact that locking down, despite the sacrifices it entails, is uncomplicated compared to what confronts us now.
Stopping was hard, but starting again is beset by difficulties, and a great many of them churn inside us. The leaders of the State must balance safety against freedom, but that is an issue we all must try and reconcile, too.
We understand we must stay safe, but we also know that the past two months have placed a tremendous strain on people, and by extension the economy and other aspects of Irish life.
That has to change, but it can only do so slowly, we are told, and if we continue to maintain vigilance.
We are then required to be both bold and cautious, to savour the future while treading with care through the present.
And we must do all this as the memory of how we once lived recedes further into the past.
We didn’t know how good we had it, and we cannot know if we will ever have it so good again.
‘What comes next remains in our gift’