The coming weeks will make or break the Covid fight and the Government

WE are facing into a few weeks that will define the immediate future of country and probably decide the fate of our increasingly unstable and unpopular Government. Having been closed for the last five months, some 4,000 primary and secondary schools across the country have, this week, reopened their doors and welcomed their students back.

The reopening of schools has, of course, been greeted with a degree of understandable trepidation but, in general, the main response seems to be a mixture of joy and relief.

It is a defining moment in Ireland’s battle with Covid-19 and represents a huge stride in our collective effort to get back to something approaching normality.

With the summer over and winter – along with its associated threats like flu season – now looming, we are about to enter a very different phase in the fights against and the struggle to live with the Coronavirus.

The experience of Covid-19 has been nothing short of horrendous but there is a growing sense that as the crisis erupted in spring and summer, the worst may be still to come.

We have no idea what will happen in schools in the coming weeks but we must hope for the best. We’ve been warned to expect outbreaks in schools and they are almost certain to occur.

However, the precautions that have been put in place look robust and schools have spent weeks preparing to reopen.

There are certainly some problems with the Government’s plan for reopening schools but, overall, it seems be well thought out. Or at least as well thought out as any plan can be in these extraordinary and difficult times.

If all goes to plan and outbreaks in schools are kept to a minimum, it will be a major victory in the war on Covid and could herald a further reopening of society.

If it goes wrong – and let us hope it doesn’t – it could be disastrous and set the country back months while potentially plunging us back into the depths of lock-down. Worse still, a dark wintry lock-down.

It would also be nothing short of disastrous for Micheál Martin and his beleaguered Government.

Ever since they took office it feels like a day hasn’t passed without some scandal or self-inflicted crisis engulfing the coalition.

Long before Golfgate, the public’s faith in the Government was fraying. In the wake of the Oireachtas Golf Society’s spectacularly misjudged Galway party, it has been shredded to ribbons.

To be fair, not all of the Government’s problems are of their own making and the new administration has had, what could charitably be described, a run of remarkably bad luck.

Mr Martin has staked his Government’s reputation and its future on getting Ireland’s schools back open successfully and without a surge in virus cases.

He and the entire country need a stroke of good luck like never before. We should all cross our fingers and pray that he, and in turn we, get one.