THIS week saw the strangest St Patrick’s Day any of us has ever experienced. The only thing familiar was the incessant rain. Bars were closed and traffic was light; at a noon mass in Irish a few handfuls of people were scattered across the mostly empty aisles.
Coronavirus has created an eerie half-world where people aren’t quite sure how to react. While leisure centres, theatres and some cinemas closed their doors, some people gathered in the few open cafés wondering when they’d be asked to start working from home.
Others endured the terrible 'distancing' that in my family’s case saw our 92-year-old mum’s care home initially closed to visitors. Then we were told we could visit one at a time each day. Now, after the latest confusion from blustering Boris, we aren’t sure what our access will be.
It was heartbreaking to read about one Italian man who lost both of his elderly parents to the disease within hours of each other. Both died alone in their hospital in Lombardy – the last face they saw was behind a medical mask.
At this time of crisis, it would be good if our government didn’t automatically follow the fault lines of British versus Irish when it comes to official advice. It’s not a question of preferring to believe Leo over Boris, though you have to admit the temporary taoiseach played a blinder with his address to the nation on St Patrick’s night.
Why can’t we just accept physical geography for a moment? We are closer to themmuns down the road than themmuns across the water. It’s not a cunning plot to erode Britishness or reinforce our European identity... it’s just practicality.
It seemed like a good time to re-read La Peste by Albert Camus which I did for A-level French back in the olden days. It tells a fictional story about the city of Oran in Algeria, which is afflicted with a plague that comes out of nowhere.
Quarantined from the rest of the country and struggling to cope with this mysterious illness, local people start off by ignoring it. Then, as it begins to claim more and more lives, some people turn out to be heroic in their basic human decency while others succumb to evil.
Eventually the plague retreats and the people learn they have to pull together as a community to survive. The story was an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France which of course saw both acts of heroism and self-serving collaboration with the enemy.
Just as now, while there are people hoarding and clearing shelves, and abusing pharmacy workers, there are many more arranging grocery deliveries to their elderly neighbours, organising phone calls and skype messages to people on their own and making sure food banks don’t run short.
I was touched to read about a 14-year-old boy who lifted the last two packets of pasta from a supermarket shelf only to notice an elderly lady would have nothing. He promptly dropped both packets into her basket saying, “You probably need it more than me.”
It’s at times like this that you also see the best and worst in some countries: the Italians singing from their balconies and the Spanish applauding their exhausted medical workers who came out from their clinics, took a brief bow, before going back to their hellish duties.
And while over here there’s been some panic buying of toilet rolls (why?) and dry pasta, we can be thankful we aren’t in California where there is actually panic buying of guns.
Best to remember Albert Camus’ words: “What we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”
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IN THE current climate, it’s not surprising that the long-awaited RHI inquiry report was a damp squib. It concluded that nearly everyone was to blame, but mostly the civil service.
Arlene should’ve read the legislation she was promoting, but she was misled by civil servants. Her special adviser shouldn’t have leaked confidential documents to his cousins and other family members who had 11 boilers between them, but that wasn’t corruption.
The DUP and Sinn Fein played fast and loose with the code employing their spads, who were running the show up at Stormont. But who was it that turned a blind eye and didn’t enforce the code? Civil servants again.
So everyone is very sorry and it won’t happen again. That’ll be £7 million pounds for the cost of the enquiry. Thanks taxpayer, you lose again.
