Eoghan Harris
Leo has a vested interest in long lockdown
LAST week, I got the grim news that my dormant prostate cancer had woken, red in tooth and claw, and was roaming around other areas — which meant a return to hospital.
Accordingly, at 77 years of age, and with a serious illness, I can tell some hard home truths about our handling of Covid-19 without worrying whether it will go down well or not.
As I have hinted in my column for many weeks, I am against the current total lockdown for two reasons.
First, I believe it was not necessary. We could have followed Taiwan in testing, social distancing, face masks and staying at work. Result: only six deaths.
Second, if cancer were a virus I don’t believe it is ethically right to protect my life at any cost if doing so darkens the future lives of young men and women.
Before you jump out of your cocoon, let me ask you two rhetorical questions.
Do you really think if Covid-19 returns next year we can go on cocooning and protecting people of my age at the cost of wrecking the future of our children?
Why did we not simply tell people over 70 to stay at home, give them every help, ban big public gatherings but otherwise let people under 70 work, using social distancing and masks, running the same risks as checkout staff do every day?
Naturally my opposition to the lockdown is not a majority view — but it has big minority backing.
Last week, an Amarach survey for CB Live asked: “Do you think the Government should loosen Covid restrictions on May
5?” Answers: No 47pc, Yes 33pc, Don’t Know 20pc.
Let me make an educated guess. I bet the 47pc in favour of continuing the lockdown contain a fair number of what I call Continue Cocooners — comfortably retired civil servants, professionals and others who were cocooning long before this broke out.
Conversely, I bet the
33pc against continuing is made up mostly of people who work in the productive private sector, who keep the economy going — and pay for the public service pensions that sustain the more comfortable cocooners.
But laying the class and income divide aside, there was no reason for the draconian confinement of healthy older people.
As Maureen Gaffney said on RTE last Friday, it was better for older people before cocooning with supermarkets creating special times for shopping.
Again I ask: if Covid-19 returns, are we going to shut down the economy again?
We simply can’t. Which means the “no one is safe until we’re all safe” mantra is running out of road.
As a Sinn Fein populist soundbite, it’s politically dishonest because it’s practically unachievable.
How did we end up as a country where most people believe a soundbite that looks like a love child born of Mills & Boon and Ireland’s Own?
Why do cosy cocooners get so angry when I ask them who will pay their pensions if our young people are left without jobs?
The answer is that most of the media gave up giving our people reality checks about hard choices.
A cash-strapped RTE was the most compliant of all — with the courageous exception of the Prime Time programme.
For example, the media never fully exposed the scandal whereby the fragile old were dumped into private nursing homes at the same time as the State sucked workers into higher paid HSE jobs. Fully half the deaths from Covid-19 came from nursing homes.
Given this scandal, I expected management consultant Eddie Molloy to take the Government to task last Sunday when he appeared on the panel of Brendan O’Connor’s radio show. Instead he gave a blanket absolution to the authorities.
Molloy: “I think it would be a mistake to blame decision-making that led to people being moved from hospitals into nursing homes.”
He then muddied the waters by citing a report on St Mary’s Nursing Home, Phoenix Park, about an inspection in October 2019.
“Here’s the sad thing about St Mary’s. It’s well run, it’s well managed, it meets all the Hiqa standards on almost every criteria.
But, the infrastructure was outdated. Inspectors observed damage to plasterwork, paintwork, walls, doors, skirting boards and flooring poorly maintained.”
What on earth does shabby paintwork on skirting boards have to do with protecting elderly residents from a virus?
In sum, Eddie Molloy presented the nursing home tragedy as less about political accountability and more about systemic failures. Which means that nobody is really to blame.
But Molloy is not just a neutral observer. Simon Harris appointed him as a member of the Slaintecare Implementation Advisory Council in October 2018.
Let me now turn to the egregious attempt of the HSE and Nphet to play down the compelling case for compulsory face masks.
Last week in the Sunday Independent, Professor
Luke O’Neill of TCD cited convincing evidence that face masks — not surgical masks, just ordinary fabric masks — were the way to go.
But on Prime Time last Tuesday, faced by even more evidence of the value of face masks, the reaction of the Irish experts on the panel was a study in defensive green jersey evasion.
On a link, Vladimir Zdimal from the Czech Academy of Sciences, compared the Covid-19 experiences of the Czech Republic with that of its neighbour, Austria.
He said the Czech government made the wearing of face masks mandatory on March 19 — and within days there was a massive decline in the spread of the virus.
Conversely, Austria opted not to go down the face mask route and the spread continued to increase.
Faced with these facts, the two Irish experts respectively ducked and dug their heels in.
Miriam O’Callaghan first asked Kim Roberts, assistant professor of virology in TCD, if she had changed her mind on masks.
Prof Roberts shook her head and smiled for a full five seconds before talking around the question without answering it.
The other Irish expert, Dr Cillian de Gascun, chairman of Nphet’s Expert Advisory Group, doubled down on his previous position.
“The problem with the masks issue is that the evidence isn’t strong in any direction.” Oh yes it is.
Like Sinn Fein, it seems some experts have extreme difficulty in either changing their mind or admitting they might be wrong.
Luckily, I have good news proving my mantra that the public is always ahead of the politicians and experts.
Dublin women are going into attics, hauling out antique sewing machines and making fabric masks.
The problem is some of the machines belonged to their grandmothers and need repairs or servicing.
To the rescue, John
Fegan, whose family have run the Singer Sewing machine shop on Talbot St for more than 100 years.
John both rents machines and cycles around the county, servicing them. His number is 087 2422762.
John Fegan is my hero. In a small but significant way, he is getting us ready to go back to work.
Leo Varadkar is not my hero. Addicted to endless exposure on RTE, Varadkar has a vested political interest in locking us down for as long as possible.
‘Faced with the facts, studio reaction by our Irish experts was a study in green jersey evasion’