I dont know any young person thatās not in a relationship and thatās following the restrictions. Personally I wouldnāt go to a big house party but Iāve still broken the restrictions as a point of principle everyday for about 170 days in a row now. I will continue to break the restrictions everyday forever, no matter what the covid situation is or what the law does to me. The cops have been sound and Iāve not had any trouble from them. I am not a Trump supporter or a conspiracy theorist.
Saying that young people are complying with the restrictions enough for numbers to go down is a complete cod - thatās just another way of saying that young people make responsible decisions themselves but ignore the 5km because itās stupid and unnecessary, along with any other stupid rules they donāt like. And that thatās enough.
What was the effect on the R number of Archbishop Tony coming back and reintroducing Level 5 in autumn last year? Mobility has been steadily increasing from mid-January 2021 until this week, what has happened to the R number during that time?
Most people my age that I say this to agree with me 100%. I had one lady friend who started talking one day about how Sweden had been a failure and they were worse off than other Scandinavian countries but she was telling me this after driving about 40km outside her county to meet me. I didnt bother arguing with her.
At work the girls openly talk about getting their hair cut at the weekend we ask each other if we know anyone taking it seriously - no-one does. The gardai arenāt taking it seriously themselves- they are all cutting each otherās hair in the barracks until they get ratted out.
No-one who claims that everyone they know of is following restrictions is worth listening to and sadly that includes several.people on this site. You lost all credibility when you said that. There are two possible reasons why people are lying to you - the first possibility is people feel sorry for you and that it most likely your situation after the tragedy with your father. Iād imagine some folk also feel a little guilty telling you the truth about their lives to your face. The second possibility is that people lie because theyāre talking to judgmental pigs and couldnāt be bothered with the hassle. I dont think thatās your situation.
The scary thing is the zero Covid religion is starting to gain traction. Iām seeing more and more articles on it, arguing that ok we fucked up in 2020 but itās not too late we can fix it now. Ireland seems to have fallen for zero Covid by stealth.
Iāll just pick out a couple of things from your post Tank if you donāt mind, the important stuff.
It fell. It was successful, in other words.
But I didnāt say that.
Of course people are breaking restrictions. But people breaking restrictions has always been built into lockdown. The only thing that matters as regards lockdown is whether it is reducing cases or keeping them at a manageable plateau. It has done that and all the lockdowns in this country have done.
Iām not judgmental as regards people breaking restrictions either as long as theyāre not completely taking the piss. It doesnāt particularly bother me if people are having a kickaround on the local green or cans in the local park or going 30km for a drive rather than 5km. It doesnāt even particularly bother me if people are having occasional house parties as long as theyāre reasonably sized, say no more than 15 or something like that. People are generally reasonable as long as other people are reasonable.
The Dublin GAA thing did bother me because the Dublin team are in a position of real influence and far from showing humility, they showed unbelievable arrogance in what they did, they turned up to their regular training venue at the regular time as if there was no pandemic. It wasnāt that what they did was dangerous as regards Covid, itās that as the countryās leading sports team, theyāre in a position of influence, leadership and example and they used it very badly, and so did Dublin GAA as a whole because thereās no way knowledge of what was going on didnāt go right to the top of Dublin GAA. If four or five of them had been having a kick around in St. Anneās Park I wouldnāt have cared.
Grand, hyperbolic statements like āyou lost all credibility when you said thatā are not arguments. Even Kevin Keegan would have blushed at that.
And if you want to retain credibility in your arguments, youād be better off arguing with what people say, rather than what they donāt say.
Even from what you say, most people, including young people mostly keep to the spirit of not the letter of the rules.
As you said you go swimming every day which is in breach of the rules, but itās within the spirit and no one thinks your doing any harm. You also said youāve had no problem doing it which suggests you are either a border fox level polices evader or that actually neither our rules or their enforcement are as stringent as you make out.
Itās not an argument to use over the top emotional language to try and denigrate something. The advocates for Zero Covid/aggressive suppression have been consistently winning the arguments, and they have extensive real world evidence to show their arguments are on the money.
I think thatās what really irks a lot of people on this forum who took a particular position long ago and have seen the evidence of how that position was a failure, yet dug into that position in the face of the evidence.
That is the actual definition of religious extremism.
I completely disagree with this mate. The zero covid advocates in Ireland are absolutist nutjobs with zero real world experience. Tomas Ryan and Sam McConkey saying we should be able to find a solution to the small issue of the border with northern Ireland is just laughable.
If he genuinely felt he was right he wouldnāt have to resort to such ludicrous hyperbole, heād have actual arguments and points. As it is heās going deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole of cray cray. Language like that is a giveaway of somebody having a serious cognitive dissonance.
If you listen to Ryan heās not an absolutist at all, heās very sensible, he has continually dealt with the epidemiological reality while others labour under the delusions of keeping normality without any sort of plan to keep cases down.
Every solution offered by anyone during this pandemic has been vilified as extreme, and in normal times they obviously would be, but these are not normal times.
I think there are degrees of extremism. To me, shutting the border as much as possible anyway) and mandatory hotel quarantine last May would obviously have been viewed as extreme in normal times. But during a global pandemic? It does not strike me as extreme to shut your borders to try and eliminate the virus causing the biggest global pandemic in a century, in order that you might be able to achieve a form of normality. Especially at a time when cases were bumping around in single figures or very low double figures.
How would that have been more extreme than what we have gone through? What we have gone through was marketed as not being extreme. But it was much more extreme in reality.
Then what the likes of McNamara wanted was much more extreme again.
I was actually thinking about a more strongly worded comment in one of your earlier posts to labane about how as far as you could see most people were following the rules - @Tierneevin1979 honed in on it right away. Iām lying in bed typing on my phone and I couldnāt be bothered going back for it.
You missed out on a lot of chat here. There was a wedding in my home parish in Monaghan over Christmas with over 200 people at it, key men from the local gga club helped with it. It wasnt travellers and no-one grassed. The pool table from the gga club has been moved into one of the local shebeens also. Big funerals in Monaghan as well.
To put it another way, going back to the time when we had single figures or very low double figure case numbers last June and July, while Melbourne was having 700 cases daily.
What we did in our ārecovery planā was like Henry Shefflin trying to recover for the 2010 All-Ireland hurling final after he did his cruciate in the semi-final. He fooled himself into believing he was fine to play, but he wasnāt. Unsurprisingly, he limped off after 10 minutes.
What Melbourne did was like Shefflin putting in the work and the rehab over the winter of 2010/11. It took longer and was gruelling, but the results were there at the end.
Well of course there have been events like that, and we see the consequences they can have, but broadly speaking I think the Irish people have been remarkably stoic and the proof is in the figures.
Ryan is a mental case mate. If you listen to him he is clearly an odd man. His suggestion of moving Christmas down the road a bit to January or February is an illustration of this.
My assessment of the zero coviders is that they are scientifically correct, and they keep pushing it because they know this. I think they are driven by their academic interest, they are completely blind to society and they donāt care to know anything about it. Their method cannot apply to the real world here, and they wonāt accept that. Australia and New Zealand are not comparable countries for the purposes of managing covid.
I genuinely think this āISAG groupā are utter cunts by refusing to acknowledge their blind spots and by selling trying to sell a fiction to scared and harried people with their refrains of ālook, people are going to rugby matches in new Zealand, we could have that.ā They deliberately try to mislead and they have further undermined the already shit job our government has done in lots of ways.
On MHQ, I fundamentally disagree with it. There are much less intrusive measures that can be used to achieve the same effect. In any event the fact that it is not recommended by either the ECDC or WHO, and that countries that opened to tourism last summer did not experience a corresponding spike shows that it is a nonsense. The problem is in the country, it is not coming from outside. Itās even more ridiculous now when we are a very short few months from full vaccination. We are now seen as a loony fringe European country. Itās an embarrassment.
As always, the example of how to manage this better is there for us by looking to the EU countries that have done a good job of it. And as always, we ignore that and look to English speaking countries.
My assessment is that weāve done an utterly shit job. Weāve done it by having more restrictions than necessary for most of the year, and by focusing attention on areas that werenāt important while ignoring areas that were.
