Will the pandemic change our lives forever – for the better?

World of Politics with Harry McGee

My last trip abroad was in early March of last year. I was involved in a documentary for RTÉ, interviewing George Mitchell, Bill Clinton and US-based journalist Ed Moloney.                                         I felt like one of those storm chasers who actively go looking for tornadoes and try to stay just ahead of it.

They do it for thrills; we did it by chance and, as the trip went on, with an increasing sense of fear and foreboding.

It was a four-day trip. We arrived in Florida and left the next day after interviewing Mitchell, the broker of the Good Friday Agreement. Almost as soon as the plane was airborne, one of the US’s first major breakouts occurred there.

We arrived in New York just as the first cases were being announced there and left on the eve of the city being shut down by Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Bill Clinton’s people cancelled the interview initially, but then agreed to do it the next day. Just after we left, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar arrived in the US to announce a St Patrick’s Day like no other, and to shut down the country.

It might sound like the life of a political correspondent is an exotic one and we spend all of our time jetting abroad. The converse is true. Most of my working life in Ireland has been spent (until lockdown came in) around the vicinity of Kildare Street in Dublin 2.

Foreign trips are few and far between – besides, as I get older, they no longer have that pulse-quickening lure they once may have had.

Anyway, as I departed my front door, my wife doused me with sanitising gel in the same way my mother used to spray me with Holy Water when I was off on some trip as a younger man.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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