How would you have dealt with Northern Ireland if you had your way?
Your position is essentially an absolutist one: if anywhere is open, everywhere should be open. I simply do not share that outlook.
On masks⌠To me, the idea that a mask covering your nose and mouth would offer no protection at all against a largely airborne virus while you walk briskly through an indoor space runs against common sense.
On lockdowns⌠There is no point going around in circles. We are not going to agree. I believe lockdowns were needed as an emergency measure at certain points and last Christmas Eve in Ireland was one of them. I simply cannot contemplate the level of chaos to which you would assent â or to which you say you would assent.
On wearing a mask out of courtesy⌠I see no harm in this sentiment.
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I agree wholly that from that point we did a really shit job.
But I fundamentally disagree that zero covid would have been a better response.
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Possibly not but there were a few things I needed to get off my chest. I apologise. I shouod have considered your busy schedule.
As regards âspirit of the rulesâ for me thatâs just a way if saying the law is stupid and people shouldnât obey it but exercise personal responsibility and follow their own good conscience. People should follow their good conscience always, thatâs not a defence if the mandatory lockdown.
As regards the lax enforcement, the gardai have had a great pandemic. As has been said here they donât really want to book you, if you are polite and have your excuses ready you should get out most trouble. I had a guard laugh at me face when I told him I was going grocery shopping at 7 in the morning. However I have always been very careful to dodge any checkpoint that is dodgeable, taking big detours and using traffic watch Google Maps, etc.
I know people who have been fined for walking on beaches in County Louth. It was his nearest beach. The argument that a law is acceptable because it isnât enforced isnât a good defence for a law. In fact, itâs dangerous. It also corrodes public morality and leads to an ongoing national hypocrisy that makes it harder for anyone to live a moral life or have integrity. There is historical precedent for this effect on the character in the Archbishop McQuaid-era but this post is long enough already.
Iâve already been up front that I would have shut the border, as much as is possible anyway, and it was possible to shut it. Yes, this would obviously have been a very drastic response, but we were in a position which merited a drastic response. We were and still are in a position where cherished ideas of open borders and internationalism - which I am in inherent believer in - clashed with epidemiological reality.
Most people will work away within the rules or broadly within them⌠They will adapt as the situation sees fit.
But you have some of the LIDTF crowd are absolute fundamentalists. Not all that long ago there was a few vigilantes on here following me around for weeks calling me a murderer for letting my kids play with the neighbours kids⌠You never know what your dealing with
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Fair enough. I donât think that was feasible but at least itâs an opinion. Most of the Zero Coviders just choose to ignore it like it makes no difference
He definitely isnât. You say yourself that they were scientifically correct. That to me is the ball game. This was a case where scientific correctness trumped everything.
I havenât discounted Norway or Finland at all. I think itâs unlikely that an aggressive suppression strategy would have resulted in an Australia/New Zealand type situation, but maybe it could have resulted in something similar to Norway or Finland.
Something far from perfect, very much not perfect, and hard to achieve - not easy - but something better than what weâve gone through.
This is a scandal waiting to be exposed 
Hard to believe
Well I think they probably would have been of the same opinion but know it is not achievable for them politically. But as it is now, NI has raced ahead of us in terms of vaccinations and they have also introduced mandatory hotel quarantine for nearly 40 countries, so perhaps the border is becoming less of a problem?
Before, NI was in a worse position than us but now theyâre in a better position.
One of the things that has irked me throughout is how people have pointed out how something is not perfect as if that is a reason for not doing that thing.
Itâs the sort of âall or nothingâ mentality which we see as regards the opening of essential retail v the closing of non-essential retail.
IMO Zero Covid is essentially a utopianist position. Historically utopianist positions have nearly always been disasters. Off the top of my head I canât think of any utopianist vision being successful - possibly the state of Israel (highly problematic when out into reality, letâs avoid that tangent). Even US democracy wasnât utopianist - Locke was a complete pragmatist, giving pragmatic solutions to the problem of government corruption. Humanity needs to get in line with the utopianist zero-covid vision.
As regards the zero-covid and the border, their plan isnât just to close the border, itâs to create a permanent permanent âbuffer zoneâ. Suffice to say that I have issue with this, not just because it would be mildly inconvenient to my current situation. I think it poses serious questions about our conception of citizenship - historically we cut the people of the 6 counties loose whilst still demanding a certain loyalty from them - this caused enormous tensions and traumas on both sides which continue to this day. Cutting northerners who are actually within the state loose as well seems to me more âtheoretically problematicâ again, never mind the practicalities.
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OK, but if its utopian, which implies it is fundamentally unachievable, how do you square that with it having been shown to work in the real world?
Is Zero Covid not a strategy that requires perfection, or close to it anyway?
Yes, this is the view that the nutjobs take. The trouble is it absolutely cannot be translated to the real world in Ireland. And so itâs utterly wrong.
Itâs also incredibly simplistic.
The more difficult but better approach would have been to work harder to manage it better instead of sticking our heads in the sand.
Be over shortly enough lads.
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Sorry mate but no, it wasnât, and it isnât.
If you stay out of east Belfast you shouldnât encounter too many problems.
How did she skip the queue?
The air border is tough to close too. A phenomenal amount of stuff and people come through it. All our logistics and supply lines depend on people coming through.
We are a completely different animal in that regards to New Zealand
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To an extent yes, but at the same time it acknowledges that nothing will ever be perfect, if thatâs not a contradiction, and I don;t think it is. I think itâs a strategy that requires a fundamental acknowledgment of the principle that you canât live with Covid in a situation where vaccinations have not reached critical mass. Itâs a zero tolerance for Covid strategy.
But I think thatâs a principle that Ireland itself now pretty much acknowledges. Weâve tried the opposite, living with Covid, and found it doesnât work, itâs just a lot harder now to get to a better situation.
I suppose my point is that even if Zero Covid/aggressive suppression did not result in a situation where there was zero Covid, and clearly there are isolated outbreaks in the so called Zero Covid countries, it might at least have resulted in a situation which was better than what we had, because you would have established the principle of much swifter action and established a better framework to stop the virus coming in from outside your borders.
Maybe perfection was not achievable, but something better surely was.
One of the main problems with it as I see it is the sorry state of our public health teams. Maybe with basically no functioning public health teams, we were always fighting blind. These were decisions we made. And they are decisions we have to rectify not just for the rest of this pandemic but for the next one.
I just fail to see how it would have resulted in a situation which was as bad or worse than what we have.
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