Vaccine is the light on the horizon – but we have dark roads to travel first

World of Politics with Harry McGee

Usually around this time, those New Year’s resolutions are finally given their last rites, and people begin to get round to planning their real resolutions. These don’t involve self-improvement; self-sacrifice; self-deprivation of any kind. They are, in fact, your summer holidays.

As the great Christy Moore observed: “Everybody needs a break, climb a mountain or jump in a lake. Some head off to exotic places. Others go to the Galway Race… Some jet of to Frigiliana, But I always go to Lisdoonvarna.”

Well if he wants to go to Lisdoonvarna this summer, he should be okay if he goes late. But as for jetting off anyway, he can forget about it.

You can forget about France. You can forget about going to see if Galway can bate Mayo. You can forget about the hurling and Dublin Marathon and the Galway Races and the Arts Festival in the way we are used to them.

I think it’s fairly unlikely we will see the resumption of full contact sport, except at an elite level.

If we are eating out, or going on holidays, or crossing the country boundary, it’s not going to happen until summer is well established – perhaps as late as July.

Over the weekend, I was cleaning off some of the detritus from my desktop and came across an argument made by the chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan to the government in October (and that was less than four months ago).

Just to set the scene, it was soon after he returned from leave. Most of the country was in Level 3.

Holohan was concerned that there had been a rapid deterioration over the past week, and that the State was now looking at exponential growth of cases.

He pointed out to the numbers in hospital increasing almost five-fold in five weeks. The same went for ICU patients. It was outside Dublin that most of the damage was being done, with an estimated R or reproduction rate of 1.6.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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