First silence... then came the sirens. All day and night, they never stopped

The army arrived in the north to take away the dead

Former speechwriter to then-taoiseach Enda Kenny, MIRIAM O’CALLAGHAN was in Italy when Covid first appeared in our lives a year ago. This weekend marks the first anniversary of the virus being documented in Ireland and what an emotionally tumultuous year it has been for all citizens – and a Government that is still grappling to handle the crisis

IT has been a year – and a century.

I started out as a Covid refugee in Italy, creeping past old Plague Hospitals and Templar churches to help a friend the night the first lockdown was announced.

A single press conference and PM Giuseppe Conte confined 60 million people to villas, Renaissance apartments, high-rise housing developments and minuscule studio flats.

His message was, the health of Italians comes first.

That night my son and I were the only people on the street as we rushed to make the midnight deadline, our steps ringing off walls from which partigiani had fired on the Gestapo, the voices from the national broadcaster RAI and SkyTG24 battling it out from the high windows, where at intervals, men and women stood, leaning out, phones lighting their faces as they bellowed into the dark.

For the weeks that followed, the daily soundtrack was… well… silence. Interspersed with bells and birdsong. Then came the sirens. Day and night. They never stopped. In the media, all the talk was of Bi-Lateral Interstitial Pneumonia, crumpled doctors wandering out of hospitals, grey, haunted, to talk to the banks of media outside.

It’s a tsunami, they said. It never stops, they said. The people just keep on coming, they said. Line after line, ward after ward, resuscitation post after resuscitation post: it was the coronavirus, as they called it then, in the days before Covid-19. In either name, death by suffocation.

The lockdown was immediately operatic. Carabinieri, Polizia and the army on the streets, helicopters overhead, drones buzzing rural areas. Some good soul had gone around the locality, leaving heart-shaped notes on letterboxes.

Andra’ tutto bene. Everything will be ok. This was a society that knows what it is to carry papers, and by God, they carried them with a vengeance in the lockdown.

One shopper only per household, their identity and journey documented for police checks.

They could leave home for certified work, a short walk, to shop for food, go to the doctor or pick drugs up at the chemist. Other than that? Locked in.

For a few weeks, walks were confined to within 200 metres of people’s habitation. Everyone felt the strain. For the rebellious who sought to bend the rules, Italian mayors took to the airways, excoriating their townspeople.

Black-ops trips to the hairdressers? Your coffin will be closed, who will see you or the state of you? I will forbid you from setting foot on public soil, from walking in my town. Every dog must have a prostate problem, they’re out so much for a pee. As for the school leavers planning a party? Wonderful, said President of Campania, Vincenzo de Luca. We’ll send the Carabinieri. With flamethrowers. The mayors became an internet sensation.

That lockdown was tough. It was hell. But the days lengthened and the sun shone and the birds sang louder and the bells rang out over the city, as they had for centuries, and on the news the numbers started to go down.

In hi-vis gear, the Civil Protection went door to door with free masks for everyone. Just as Italy felt it was getting somewhere, the army arrived in the north to take away the dead. There were simply too many coffins. So came truck after truck in endless cortege. In Lombardy, they lost a generation.

Back at home, it was shocking to see how lax our lockdowns had been and are: no documentation required, the possibility to go shopping daily if we wish, browse in a DIY store, have our garden landscaped. Late in the day, while the Italians donned their masks out of habit, we were still debating their merits and requirement.

To me, it was nuts. I thought of early March, and the CMO suggesting that even Ireland could ‘possibly’ see individual cases of the virus, and how odd that observation seemed at the time and since.

In the end, we closed down too late, opened up too quickly, failed to employ enough public health doctors, establish test-and-trace properly, introduce mandatory hotel quarantining (MHQ) of arrivals at our ports and ferries. Kicking and screaming, the Government has been dragged to MHQ, but not for all arrivals, only some.

It has failed – and abjectly – to learn the lessons of the virus. The disease is global so MHQ for all overseas arrivals is a no-brainer. And isn’t the first duty of government to protect its people?

In the year, it has been quite something to see the premium we place on Government ‘communication’ over actual action. The then-health minister Simon Harris was announcing a visa for the Easter Bunny, while good HSE managers were ever-more frantic

about the death rates in our nursing homes. It seemed that even the pandemic had been reduced to the plastic politics of the soundbite, the tweet, the post on Instagram or Facebook; the Government’s constant need and desire to ‘engage’, to entertain. Above all, to be ‘liked’, popular. Shucks.

The current ‘Government communication’ is plain weird. Working in politics for a long time, I’ve seen a fair amount of backstabbing, some of it up close, the longest knives inserted in private. Now, though, politicians rush to the media to undermine their colleagues – yes, their colleagues – in Government. It’s toxic in attitude and action in an administration with only a tenuous connection to pandemic reality, judging by the doggedness and diplomatic ‘wisdom’ that the Taoiseach would go to Washington for St Patrick’s Day.

The Know Betters tutted about why we’re even having the conversation. Sure, why wouldn’t we impose ourselves on the Yanks? Mercifully, President Biden’s administration have good boundaries and oodles of common sense. They know this year is different. Dramatically.

Hence, St Patrick’s Day celebrations will be online, as they always should have been. Not the mortifying ‘I’ll go if I’m invited’. And The Usuals waving him on.

Italy, too, has had its political trials in the pandemic. Matteo Renzi of Italia Viva flounced off a few weeks ago, leaving Conte’s government high and dry.

Now they have Mario Draghi as PM. Mario Draghi is ‘a genius’. Genius, genius, genius. Every paper. Every bulletin. Every politician. Genius. He is. He is also a good man. But, politically, Mario Draghi is the quintessential neoliberal. And neoliberalism has nothing to offer Italy or Europe or Ireland or the world, in the challenges we are facing now, and will have to face together in the future.

Neoliberalism is the past that issued the order ‘consume!’ And we did. Only in the end, all we have been consuming is ourselves and each other.

I’m dismayed at the EU and its attitude to Covid-19. It gives me no joy to write that because I’m a passionate European.

Last spring, Ursula von der Leyen admitted that the EU had opened up too quickly for tourism. Just after mainland Europe emerged from its quarantine, holidaymakers hoiked the virus the length of the Italian peninsula out to Sardinia and Sicily.

They shook it like a holiday cocktail on ferries and planes from France, Spain, Germany,

Greece, Malta, America, England.

On France 24, I see over 20 departments going Red with the virus. Italy has its own pockets of Red, including in the north of the Tuscan region and in the towns along its borders with Umbria, where the new strains are taking hold.

I believe the EU has decided there is a level of morbidity and mortality that’s ‘worth it’ to keep its borders open. I love those open borders when times are normal. But these Covid times are not. We need new and infinitely better thinking from the eurocrats and bureaucrats, none of whom was furloughed or PUPed, and many of whom seek to lecture us on our peculiarness here over silly, inconsequential things.

Like, say, being able to retire at 65 if we wish, especially, if we’ve had a tough physical job. The Euro ‘wise’ remind us how we can’t afford this 65-retirement lark, secure in their own employment, well-paid and pensioned, the heaviest item they’ll lift in a working day, an iPad. Provided for them by the small European taxpayers.

Last night, my son rang me from Trieste. This weekend, he’s seeing his partner for the first time in eight months. He’s vaccinated and also had the necessary documentation, checked on departure and arrival, to undertake the journey.

It’s remarkable hearing him and his sister, 19, talk about meeting only ‘safe’ people. People who keep the rules of travel, testing, visiting and socialising. It’s ‘a thing’ they say. It’s just a way of life. For now.

Last week my daughter sent me a link from the web. Someone talking about our young people now being like the Russian aristocracy after the Revolution, exiled in Venice and Paris, reminiscing about their old glamour and social life.

Dressing up, putting on their perfume and jewellery, dancing, spontaneous visiting, dining. ‘God, I wish we could just wander into the bar for an aperitivo and go dancing and stay up all night and watch the sun come up.’ She and her friends live under a curfew 10pm to 5am.

The year that is a century has taught me the value of love and health, family and friendship. I have wonky lungs so avoiding Covid, at all costs, is necessary. A friend, a mental-health practitioner, told me a few months ago that the virus will not really change people’s behaviour, or who they are.

Character is there, they said. The reliable, responsible will go on being reliable and responsible. The selfish, irresponsible will go on being selfish and irresponsible.

For many, without the distance or distraction of the commute, the office or social life, it’s been a year of self-discovery.

It’s not always pleasant to find or live so intimately with ourselves. Yes, chances are, we will survive this.

But what will we learn in doing so? Overall, I believe the virus is an amuse-bouche to the feast of destruction that awaits us unless we change how we live. Our Holocene, in every sense, is over. The WHO’s Dr Mike Ryan in his dire warning to humanity, is right.

Was it a bat or a pangolin that brought the world, and all of us, the year of the virus?

Regrettably, no. It was ourselves.

Back at home, it was shocking to see how lax our lockdowns had become