I’ll leave that to the good people in the Dept. of Transport Tourism and Sport
Open it open it up ta fawk
The GAA looks like a tough one for me. Pro sports can entertain the idea of bubbles for teams.
I guess if the GAA are thinking of a July start rather than June it might be more feasible.
Why would they bother training sure? @BruidheanChaorthainn heard from a reliable source yesterday the whole championship was cancelled
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You should ask your club man about the correspondence they received during the week about the rest of the season instead of having a go at me.
They’ll have to send the same information to Croke Park. They seem to be trying to go ahead with it
Are you simple or something? I said they’d finish off the league and that was it. That would require training. That is completely different to not playing a championship.
The French are done with it
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Coronavirus: Tory grandees tell Boris Johnson: it’s time to ease lockdown
Boris Johnson will return to work on Monday to face the strongest challenge yet to lift the social restrictions imposed on the public five weeks ago. Picture: AFP
- By CAROLINE WHEELER and OLIVER SHAH
- THE TIMES
- 7:42PM APRIL 26, 2020
- NO COMMENTS
A pincer movement of Conservative Party donors, cabinet ministers and senior Tory backbenchers is putting UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson under concerted pressure to ease the lockdown.
Mr Johnson will return to work on Monday to face the strongest challenge yet to lift the social restrictions imposed on the public almost five weeks ago.
The backlash follows Downing Street briefings last week that Mr Johnson was cautious about easing the lockdown and would “not be rushing to lift measures” after nearly losing his own life to the virus.
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Six Tory donors are calling on Mr Johnson to ease the restrictions amid signs the public is growing weary. Their intervention came as Britain’s coronavirus death toll rose by 813 to pass 20,000 on Saturday — less than a month after a senior health official said a total below that number would be a “good result”.
Home Secretary Priti Patel has spoken to the National Police Chiefs’ Council about the possibility of increasing on-the-spot fines for breaking social-distancing rules as evidence emerged that the public were tired of it.
Billionaire financier Michael Spencer, a big donor to Mr Johnson’s leadership campaign last year, said: “We should start loosening up as soon as we reasonably can and allow the economy to start moving forward. We should really begin to offer a narrative of how and when it’s going to stop.”
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Steve Morgan, the former boss of the builder Redrow, who gave £1m to the Conservatives’ election campaign, said: “We’re actually in danger that the medicine — if you want to call the lockdown that — is more harmful than the cure.
“I’m strongly in favour of getting the country back to work. This is not about profit; this is about saving the country from going bankrupt, from mass unemployment, from businesses going bust, people losing their livelihoods and homes.”
Billionaire Peter Hargreaves, who also gave £1m to the Conservatives’ election war chest, said an extended lockdown would “do more harm to people’s health by putting them out of work and ruining their businesses”.
Henry Angest, the millionaire banker who donated £500,000 to the Tories’ general election campaign, said: “We have to do something. The economy is absolutely tanking and we just can’t go on having a blank sheet.”
The chorus of disapproval from the donors who bankroll the party has been echoed by three cabinet ministers who are concerned about tens of thousands of businesses collapsing, inflicting irreparable damage on the economy.
The first cabinet minister said: “I don’t think the public will be able to take much more of this.”
A second added: “I don’t know anyone in the cabinet who doesn’t want the lockdown eased as soon as possible. If the public are beginning to give up on it, then nobody wants to see it enforced through compulsion rather than consent.”
A third cabinet minister said the lockdown may cause more people to die of preventable deaths than the coronavirus, adding: “I do not think waiting for hospital deaths to get to near zero is the answer.”
Labour leader Keir Starmer added to the pressure on Mr Johnson.
In a letter to the Prime Minister, Sir Kier said the government risked “falling behind the rest of the world” by refusing to discuss an exit strategy to the lockdown.
Former Tory business secretary Andrea Leadsom stressed the need for businesses to be given as much prior notice as possible ahead of the lockdown being lifted.
The revolt comes amid growing signs the lockdown is being flouted by the public. Data from tech giant Apple, which tracks how far people are travelling, suggests the public are moving about more than they were in mid-March.
Walking has jumped from 30 per cent of pre-lockdown levels at the end of last month to 50 per cent last week. There are also growing fears that a prolonged lockdown will trigger civil unrest and protests, such as those seen in France and the US.
The Sunday Times
‘The medicine is more harmful than the cure…’ billionaire Peter Hargreaves. Wtf
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There was no correspondence sent this week
Wonderful outburst of altruism from the Tory millionaire wing
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In October 2017, Simon Harris, the health minister, declared a public health emergency in Ireland. The National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) was assembled under the leadership of chief medical officer Tony Holohan to co-ordinate the state’s response to CPE, a superbug blighting Irish hospitals.
Nphet’s subsequent campaign against the superbug went largely unnoticed by the public, even though it involved 24 meetings over the following two years before the team was disbanded in April 2019.
A new Nphet met for the first time this year at 4pm on January 27 at the Department of Health’s headquarters at Miesian Plaza in Baggot Street, Dublin. The meeting was to discuss the virus emerging from Wuhan that had been detected in 1,988 people in China, plus 38 cases in other countries.
There were 11 members on the original team assembled by Holohan, who has co-ordinated every medical response since 2008, when a pork dioxin scare broke the day after his promotion from being deputy chief medical officer. At that first meeting in January, there were five Department of Health officials other than Holohan, plus four HSE officials, including Colm Henry, the HSE’s chief clinical officer, and John Cuddihy, the interim director of the Health Protection and Surveillance Centre (HPSC), which is responsible for tracking infectious diseases. The line-up was completed by Cillian De Gascun, director of the National Virus Reference Laboratory in UCD.
Within weeks, this committee has gone from obscurity to become the most powerful group of people in Ireland. The daily press conferences led by Holohan are watched live by thousands online. The “actions” decided by Nphet affect every person in the country. The taoiseach consistently says that any decisions on restrictions must first be approved by Nphet.
Last week Alan Kelly, the Labour Party leader, criticised the lack of transparency in Nphet’s workings. “Ultimate decision-making cannot be in the hands of the few,” he said. “Elected office cannot be subservient in this crisis. We have to heed public health advice — this is absolute — but we also need to make sure that the formulas for providing this critical public health advice are working, robust and, most importantly, transparent.”
The daily press conferences led by Holohan are watched live by thousands online
STEVE HUMPHREYS
Although Nphet has published notes of some of the 18 meetings it held up to the end of March, no records of any meetings held in April have been produced. Notes from six meetings held in March have not been published either, with some of these covering important topics such as the cancellation of the St Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin.
Nphet is guided by an expert advisory group chaired by De Gascun. The Department of Health declined to provide a list of members. Out of 11 subgroups that Nphet has formed, one of the most influential is the Irish epidemiological modelling advisory group, which uses data to forecast whether the restrictions put in place in March have sufficiently flattened the upward curve of cases so that the healthcare system is not overwhelmed.
The epidemiological group is led by Philip Nolan, the president of Maynooth University, who appears alongside Holohan every Thursday to present his group’s latest findings. Although he is not an epidemiologist, Nolan has degrees in physiology and medicine, and a PhD. The department declined to provide a list of members of Nolan’s group. Minutes of its meetings are not published.
It was modelling by Nolan’s group that warned Ireland could face a “surge” of thousands of acute cases of Covid-19. This prompted the health authorities to build capacity for intensive care beds in both public and private hospitals. At the March 23 Nphet meeting, Nolan conceded his model could not predict the impact of future mitigation measures on projections. He agreed that “introducing subjective assumptions could make it unreliable”.
One early decision by Nphet came on February 25, when it advised cancelling the Ireland rugby matches against Italy due to the outbreak in Lombardy. In the notes of Nphet meetings, debates between members are generally not recorded. “Future generations will want to know, and deserve to know, where people stood on decisions, but this is not transparent,” complained Kelly in the Dail last week.
The epidemiological group is led by Philip Nolan, the president of Maynooth University
COLIN KEEGAN
One “robust” debate was noted as having happened on March 3, however, when Nphet discussed whether people who had been abroad in areas with high numbers of Covid-19 cases should be given stricter guidelines on isolating before returning to school or work. At the time, only people who showed symptoms after returning home were told to isolate themselves. Nphet records that after the discussion the policy remained unchanged but “under review”.
Strangely, as almost half of the 1,014 probable and confirmed Covid-19 deaths recorded up to last Friday have been nursing home residents, care homes barely featured in Nphet discussions. One exception was on March 10, when it discussed a decision by Nursing Homes Ireland to ban visitors. Although Nphet discussed the prospect of closing schools and universities, members agreed that visiting restrictions at nursing homes were “not required”.
At the same March 10 meeting, Nphet rejected a proposal from the Infectious Diseases Society of Ireland (IDSI) to place the country in “full quarantine”.
Eoghan De Barra, a member of the IDSI and a Beaumont Hospital consultant, said infectious-diseases doctors accepted it was “easy” for them to advise drastic measures to break the chain of infection but they understood Nphet had to consider the impact for all of society.
De Barra said Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, gave a good description of the dilemma for medical advisers when he predicted having to face a House of Commons committee in 2021. “There’s one of two things they’re going to be saying: why did you take all this money and nothing ever happened, or why didn’t you shut everything down and spend an awful lot more money?” said de Barra. “Obviously, there’s only going to be one of those two outcomes.”
A source on Nphet says Holohan is an effective chairman who “moves along” the wide-ranging agenda at a good pace. Since late March, the team, which has grown to 32 members, meets via Zoom video-calls at least twice a week.
There are said to be “clear” tensions between the chief medical officer and the Department of Health officials on one side, and the HSE on the other side. One source said Holohan expressed frustration that the HSE did not implement Nphet decisions fast enough. Nphet notes show him repeatedly “stressing” a need for faster testing and contact tracing.
Last week Alan Kelly, the Labour Party leader, criticised the lack of transparency in Nphet’s workings
LEAH FARRELL
Nphet members point to the huge amount that has been achieved by the HSE under its guidance, however. The capacity for acute patients has been increased across public hospitals and through a deal with private hospitals. Testing capacity has been increased to a point that Holohan said the system will now handle 100,000 tests a week. More than a dozen triage centres have been established and there are plans to open 39 hubs to assess, treat and refer Covid cases to hospitals.
Nphet membership was originally limited to Department of Health and HSE officials, apart from Nolan and De Gascun. Members have also come from Hiqa, the state’s healthcare standards watchdog; and the HPRA, the medicines authority. Darina O’Flanagan, a former head of the HPSC, is its special adviser.
It was only at the end of March that spaces were given to practising doctors, around the time Nphet first identified clusters of cases in nursing homes and other residential care settings. Three frontline clinicians were brought on to Nphet on March 31, including Mary Favier, president of the Irish College of General Practitioners.
Favier said it was important for Nphet to include frontline doctors. “We can offer rapid feedback of what’s happening and changing on the ground,” she said. “GPs are often called the canaries in the mine, as we know what’s happening usually two weeks before it gets to hospital. Others may not want to flag problems in a system, whereas GPs, because we’re independent contractors, can give feedback to say something’s not working.”
Favier said she was well aware of Nphet’s powerful role in the pandemic. “Nphet effectively makes the strategic decisions and then the political impact of them is discussed elsewhere,” she said.
”In the Irish scenario, the Department of Health has completely decided to follow medical advice. That’s actually a good decision. I think the medical advice has been appropriate. It’s not always a good decision, as evidenced in the UK. You do need a political oversight that is a counterbalance to the medical advice you’re getting.”
Favier added that Nphet members were conscious of their influence over the country’s future and the easing of restrictions.
“I find it particularly weighs heavily as a GP, where I spend the rest of my day dealing with people whose mental health is being really adversely affected by being cooped up and the social and economic stresses associated with the downturn in the economy. People are struggling,” she said. “There’s a significant responsibility on Nphet to make the right decisions, and not just make them for the sake of it.”
I read that as autism, seemed a bit edgy for you but still worked.
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At this point, the question I usually get is, “What’s your evidence that lockdowns don’t work?”
It’s a strange question. Why should I have to prove that lockdowns don’t work? The burden of proof is to show that they do work! If you’re going to essentially cancel the civil liberties of the entire population for a few weeks, you should probably have evidence that the strategy will work. And there, lockdown advocates fail miserably, because they simply don’t have evidence.
Lock the thread.
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The battle has been won lads, the Lockitdown4ever merchants have fallen on their Eswords
I have it on good authority that a former poster, and a vociferous proponent of “lockitdown4ever”, was seen on the news yesterday. Out walking the promenade in Galway, no less.