It’s taken a while but it’s good to have the simple things back

Country Living with Francis Farragher

It’s now over 20-months since the news broke in the run-up to Paddy’s Day in March 2020, that the pubs were closing down and that travel restrictions were coming into place while older people were being forced to cocoon at home.

Over the past week or so as I glanced through the paper, it was quite a jolt to read of cases where people were prosecuted for travelling outside their five-kilometre travel zone or for moving outside their own counties.

The fear even seemed to nurture a new breed of zealot who watched out for anyone even giving the impression of committing any minor travel misdemeanour.

It wasn’t uncommon to come across Garda checkpoints on roads big and small who asked the obvious questions of where we were going and how far away, we were from home.

In essence there was a real sense of fear out there. Residents dying alone in isolated nursing homes; elderly people living on their own having to confine any physical movement to their house and garden; those with long-standing chest ailments in living dread of meeting someone that might have the dreaded Covid.

Although it was before my era, it was probably reminiscent of what times were like in Ireland when TB or ‘The Consumption’ as it was known, back in the mid-part of the 20th century, claimed so many lives. As well as being deadly, there was also a kind of unfair stigma attached to the arrival of the disease to the doors of unfortunate families.

That fear and stigma was there too with Covid when talk of a vaccine back in the early months of 2020 only seemed like pie-in-the-sky, a kind of an aspirational hope that might never happen.

I’ve heard stories – and from pretty reliable sources – of elderly parents who passed away in nursing homes during the height of the crisis, in the full belief that their children had forgotten about them or deserted them in their hour of need. Not true of course, but they just weren’t allowed in to see them in their hour of need.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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