No I dont agree that the context has changed. Rights are rights and the whole point of them is that they cant just be taken away. I believe this lockdown and virus response has set an awful precedent and people may now clamor for one every winter/flu season.
And that’s before you consider all the damage it has done
O’Leary O’Leary O’Leary 
From the Indo. Hard to argue with much or indeed any of this.
Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary today launched an extraordinary attack on public health experts and urged them to “get the finger out”.
Mr O’Leary was speaking on RTÉs Morning Ireland as his company revealed it expects to post a full-year loss of nearly €1bn.
The airline boss slammed Nphet and Dr Tony Holohan and accused the national broadcaster RTÉ of “pandering to the misinformation coming out of Nphet”.
Mr O’Leary accused Nphet of disseminating misinformation and “scare stories” as well as causing “mass hysteria” about international travel.
However, Mr O’Leary did not go into detail on what misinformation he believed Nphet had spread.
Mr O’Leary said there “aren’t lots of young people getting sick and going to hospital” and said: “Part of this is due to Nphet miscommunication, their daily press conference trying to terrify the population. The reality is the UK will have everyone over 50 vaccinated by March, Ireland needs to catch up, hopefully by the end of June.
“Nphet, and the Chief Medical Officer [Dr Tony Holohan] if he was doing his job properly, should be holding a daily press conference announcing how many people have been vaccinated, not issuing scare stories of numbers of people in hospital. He’s the CMO, he should be dealing with the vaccine as vaccination is the way out of this Covid crisis, not these failed lockdowns,” Mr O’Leary continued.
The airline tycoon said there would be a “dramatic reduction in Covid hype on RTÉ” once everyone over 50 is vaccinated, which he predicted by the end June, saying he expects to see a “dramatic recovery this summer”.
“If Europe and Ireland get their act together and catch up, we should be out of these lockdowns by June, and RTÉ will have to move on and talk about something else,” Mr O’Leary said.
Mr O’Leary said Ryanair would not be asking customers for proof of vaccinations.
Mr O’Leary said that when all over 50 are vaccinated, there will be a dramatic reduction in deaths, hospitalisations and sickness as “vast majority of young people are asymptomatic”.
O’Leary said the tone of Ryanair’s ‘jab and Go’ campaign was “perfectly correct” even though Ireland saw 1,000 deaths and 100,000 cases of Covid-19 in January.
“It was the right time to be sending that message, we need some optimism in Ireland, instead of the daily doses of pessimism being delivered by Nphet and RTÉ.
“What we need is to look forward to a post-vaccination date, which should be in the second quarter of this year, when Ireland begins to roll out vaccinations and Nphet would do a much better job if it actually focused on vaccinations and we had a daily announcement from Nphet with the number of people vaccinated,” the Ryanair boss said.
Asked about airline campaigns in recent weeks, Dr Holohan described them as “not particularly responsible”.
Mr O’Leary said he now concedes Easter will be “a write-off” due to the delayed vaccination programme, but said he expects to “still see millions of people travelling to the beaches of Europe in July, August and September”.
“I expect it to be a dramatic recovery this summer off the back of a successful vaccine rollout in the UK, 50pc of their population will be vaccinated by the end of March, Europe and Ireland needs to get its act together and catch up. If 50pc of our population is vaccinated by the end of June, which we expect, we see a strong recovery for summer holidays in July, August and into September,” he added.
When asked about customer refunds and claims on social media from customers saying they had not yet been refunded, Mr O’Leary said:
“Every customer that has requested a refund for us has received it. If I look on social media I see Donald Trump telling us he has won the election.
“We have no backlog on refunds, all the refunds have been issued,” he continued.
Mr O’Leary anticipated a reopening and resurgence of business at Shannon Airport for Ryanair, but was more downbeat on Cork.
He said “once the Irish government and Nphet get the finger out…we expect it to be a very strong recovery at Dublin and Shannon.
“We don’t think there will be a big recovery in Cork as there is still a very high cost of operations in Cork. In fact, Cork Airport is talking about price increases and there will not be a rapid recovery in airports where prices are increasing. We need much lower access costs if we are to restore Irish tourism.
“Irish tourism isn’t going to survive on a bunch of staycations, we need to welcome back European visitors and we need to get away from the mass hysteria created by Nphet on international travel, when the four counties with the highest rate of Covid in the country are the border counties.
“Most of the international travel that Nphet worries about is coming across the border with the north of Ireland. It isn’t coming on non-existent flights into Dublin Airport,” he said.
International travel has been a red herring in all of this. It’s been responsible for hardly any cases
Apart from Cheltenham. Those bastards will never be forgiven their treachery.
Anecdotally a lot of the building sites which did close down are back up and running from today
No, you’re completely wrong there. Rights are not absolute because different rights always have to be balanced against each other.
O’Leary again with a lot talk.
Pilots of course were ‘glorified taxi drivers’.
Then the pilots put it up to the jumped up little prick.
And he ran home with his tail between his legs.
A horrible person.
Southern Europe will be open for international arrivals and the UK will be flying wherever they are let, most of Europe will be open to international travel again. It remains to be seen if the Irish government will take the plank out of its eye, I wouldn’t out it past them to try to have a more restrictive approach on travel to anywhere else like they did last summer.
I didn’t say they were absolute, but they cant just be taken away on a whim with very little direct evidence that doing so will help. Freedom of movement within your state is gone, and I cant see any evidence that it is contributing massively to the outbreak. Ditto international travel.
Of course we will have a more restrictive approach. For some unknown reason, NPHET/The government have a huge issue with international travel during this
Health workers who are vaccinated still have to self isolate if a close contact according to a lady on Radio 1 this morning.
Surely that can’t be true.
he may well be a horrible person but after taking on the goons in aer lingus and FF would make one a serious cunt.
that said, he’ll always have my thanks for being able to get home quickly form england when my mother was dying and that id see her before she died means that he’ll have my eternal gratitude as i wouldnt have been able to afford the aer lingus monopoly rates
Look, none of this is done on a whim. There’s been a spot of a pandemic going on for the last year. You don’t do your argument any favours by completely disregarding it. To be honest, you’re just coming across as silly and petulant. I’ve a lot of sympathy for some of what you say but you’re entirely refusing to the see context or reality of the situation.
At no point have I ever disregarded the pandemic. I just think the restrictions are not proportional to the risk
An absolute me feiner
And you have clowns hanging on his every word.
You just said your rights were taken away on “a whim”. That is completely incorrect. They were restricted temporarily because there is a pandemic going on. Your version ignores the context, it’s silly.
Absolutely. Doesn’t mean he was not correct in what he said this morning.
No but I’d be very conscious of his motives.
His motives are crystal clear. And he was still completely correct.