Remembering a dark year we’d much prefer to forget

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

The image is engrained on our psyche forever – and that’s saying something after this year of years – but if Ireland’s Covid story is ever written, Chapter One might begin as dawn broke over Washington DC and Leo Varadkar stood to talk.

One Covid death had been confirmed in Ireland – that of an elderly woman with that awful phrase, ‘an underlying condition’ – and we had 43 confirmed cases.

All of the predictions at that stage were for ‘a mild to moderate illness’ but we still needed to batten down the hatches for a little while to stop the spread.

Nobody, but nobody, thought we’d spend most of the next year in lockdown, losing loved ones, losing businesses, slowly losing our minds.

Now, a year on, with a second ‘virtual’ St Patrick’s Day behind us, we can at least see the light, even if moving into it remains a way off for many of us.

If the global spread of Covid-19 marked the darkness, the vaccine roll-out is a shining example of what the collective brainpower of our brightest sparks can achieve with co-operation.

I have two sprightly aunts whose passports may have them hovering on either side of their eighties, although thankfully you wouldn’t know it if you met them.

Last week, they and my equally active uncles all received the call they’d been waiting an age for – and by pure coincidence all four of them presented for vaccination on the one day, in different parts of Dublin.

Their delight and relief afterwards were palpable; you might go as far as to describe them as giddy aunts – but their joy was entirely merited.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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