Déjà vu on streets of Sligo as March 2020 repeats itself In these pages last March, wrote about the eerie emptiness of Sligo’s town centre. This week, he walked the same streets to observe the similarities (and the differences) as a fearful country entere
THE first week of the year began with an unmistakeable sense of déjà vu. Early January in 2021 is mirroring mid-March 2020 as I, like so many others, once again found myself making arrangements for working from home in the midst of this awful virus taking hold like it did all those months ago.
We know so much more about Covid19 now than we did at the time, but doesn’t that just make what we are going through now all the more disappointing?
Fear of the unknown has outweighed fear of the virus for a lot of people if you compare the 10-month difference in the broadest terms. We haven’t seen the people baking banana bread, doing aerobics online and quizzes via Zoom en masse again just yet, but it does feel like we are living in the exact same times that prompted us to do many of these things.
This was of course on a national and international level, which made me think about how much has changed at a local level.
I recalled how in March I had taken a walk through Sligo town in the early days of the initial lockdown to get a sense of the atmosphere and how the general public has responded.
The streets weren’t totally deserted in March, but that is not to say it was busy either. You were talking about a ratio of about one person to one street at any given time. However, where March felt like an abrupt standstill, January feels as though people still have yet to tumble back into reality after the festive period.
In March, there was a deafening silence. You knew the severity of what was happening had really set in. In hindsight, I feel that this was somewhat owed to O’Connell Street not being accessible to traffic at the time. The sound of Sligo town this week has been a degree of silence with intermitting hums of engines and rolling of tyres.
Car parks weren’t completely empty either, some with more cars than during that previous lockdown. Something which can most likely be due to the greater number of food and drinks outlets remaining open and people working behind closed doors, which was far less common then.
It was terribly unusual to believe those seems streets were teeming with life little over a week ago in anticipation of Christmas.
Those were times when the much maligned bollards lining busy streets proved extremely beneficial when nav
igating footpaths where social distancing was near impossible. Days later, they serve absolutely no purpose, such is the dramatic decline in footfall. A noteable change compared to March was the lack of queues at chemists. The distanced line of people stretching from one side of O’Connell Street to the other for Ward’s Pharmacy is an image that has always stuck with me – it really summed up the genuine worry at the time of prescription medication becoming limited should supplies be affected. I recall pharmacies putting in a massive effort to allay people’s fears by exploring every avenue in ensuring supply would not run short.
It was reassuring that the legacy of those efforts has endured for those same concerns not to arise during such an extremely uncertain time – especially when hospitalisations are on the cusp of overtaking what we saw at the peak of that lockdown. The reaction of people has been largely the same. There was no sign of groups of people gathered, with one individual doing their essential shop stopping for a brief chat with another.
If you were to base it on the story the streets of Sligo are telling, the severity of what we are going through again appears to be hitting home. The full picture may suggest that this isn’t entirely the case when the local authority felt it was justified to close more public amenities than during the last lockdown, so the idea that there is widespread compliance is something that may still need to be taken with a pinch of salt for now. There is an alternative reality happening where these scenes are simply not happening. It isn’t a far-fetched reality either. It did not need to be this way again. The reality was very possible if public health was gambled on Christmas.
A lack of leadership fed into a lack of personal responsibility. People were told what they wanted to hear instead of what they needed to hear. The opinion of the economist was valued over the opinion of the health expert in times of a pandemic.
This created a perfect storm that has gotten us to where we are today – another empty Sligo, which mirrors the scenario in every village, town and city across the country.
The road back from this third wave will be a long one, but surely we have all seen enough to reach the end the journey once and for all at the other end of this.
We were so painfully close to doing that at the end of the first lockdown. We had this virus against the ropes as figures clearly showed.
We have proven to ourselves that we can get within sight of the end. Our problem was pausing before finishing the race to talk about how great we did – this time we need to actually cross the finishing line before congratulating ourselves on a job well done.
A walk through Sligo during one lockdown was eye-opening. The second was tedious at best. I don’t know what a third time will be like – all I know is I don’t want to have to sit down and write another ‘review’. We know full well what we need to do now to finally nip this in the bud.
March felt like a standstill. January feels as if people have yet to tumble back into reality after festive period