How much longer can we all hold our nerve?
BRENDA POWER
ON the same day that the Government announced that, if we’re really good, we may be allowed meet up outdoors with friends from one other household on April 12, I took the dog for a walk in the unusually balmy spring sunshine. We set off for nearby Dodder Park, and our usual route along by the river, in the late afternoon. It’s a popular spot with walkers of all ages, especially dog owners, as there’s a wide expanse of open space where dogs can enjoy a bit of freedom off the leash.
On Tuesday afternoon, though, there was no chance of letting the poor mutt loose, and I did a quick U-turn when I saw the scene in the park.
It looked, for all the world, as if a music festival was in progress, just without the music.
The place was packed, with large groups of young people seated on the grass, drinking and picnicking in the sunshine, without very much evidence of social distancing on display.
Later on, after the gardaí arrived and cleared them away, it looked even more like a festival site, with bottles, cans and food wrappers strewn everywhere.
Welcome to summer 2021. Far from being an aberration, this was a scene played out all over the country as soon as the sun shone and, it being Easter week with schools and colleges on holidays, young folk met up and mingled with little regard for the rules on social gatherings. They may not all have left their meeting places looking like rubbish tips and expected others to clean up after them – I really do blame the parents, if you produce a selfish slob of a kid that’s your bad – but they blithely broke the rules all over.
And unless somebody in authority reviews the current restriction on travel, and grants cabin-fevered citizens a lot more freedom of movement, we can expect to see greater defiance of the regulations right around the country in the months to come.
The irony of this week’s scenes of crowds by the canals and in the parks is that, in normal circumstances, no single location would have been so thronged on a fine spring day. But so long as you’re confining people from a densely populated area, like a city suburb, to a 5km radius, then that is what you are going to get. And even the proposed extension permitting travel within county boundaries, or within 20km of home even if it means crossing those boundaries, really isn’t going to change that.
On a normal sunny spring day, those young people thronging Dodder Park would have headed for the beach or the mountains, or off to a shopping centre to hang out with their pals, or out of Dublin altogether.
The medical experts insist that any such liberties would only lead to a fourth Covid surge, of an even more dangerous and infectious strain of the virus, and the Government has learned to disregard their advice at its peril.
But experts in human nature, who have rarely been consulted in these matters, will tell you that even the most compliant citizens will eventually rebel against rules that strike them as excessive, irrational or unduly harsh. A lockdown that goes on too long, in the context of a vaccine rollout that seems chaotic, disorganised and unjustly prioritising the elite, is bound to lead to the flouting of restrictions that do not appear to be fairly applied to all. Episodes like the Beacon Hospital scandal, and the daily revelations suggesting that the abuse of the vaccine programme may be far more widespread than we’ve discovered to date, don’t exactly help convince ordinary folk of the value of their sacrifices.
As for the farcical carry-on at the weekend when supposedly quarantining visitors managed to flee their hotels, and gardaí searching for them didn’t even have photographs to assist the hunt, that didn’t enhance public confidence either.
So the Government has had a foretaste of the challenges it will face, this summer, in balancing the restrictions necessary to contain the virus with the freedoms essential to maintain the public’s sanity, not to mention its trust.
Infantilising the population, and curtailing our movements and access to services with a blanket ‘because we said so’ retort, might have worked a year ago. Now, we’ve seen other countries make a better fist of vaccine rollouts, or grant their people more freedoms, while we’re still languishing in one of Europe’s longest lockdowns.
Improved communications, more coherent advice, and consistent sanctions for breaches will be essential to ensuring compliance. And, just for starters, it’d be great to see a vaccine rollout regime that didn’t bear out Maureen Potter’s famous observation that the rules for life in Ireland are printed on every hotel door: ‘Push’ and ‘Pull’.