Everyone is stretched, some in true misery about bereavement and deathly illness, far more with tension from trying not to dwell on the unreadable future.
In the circumstances, agitation about the status of the top right-hand corner of the island of Ireland is more than a little daft. There is nothing new about that angst, though more than a little of a useful warning.
Best get innermost ideas about belonging and loyalties into sync in advance of the new world ahead, re-made economies and lifestyles.
There is a harsh reality way older than this pandemic.
Bad enough that the name of Ireland is now, apparently, permanently annexed in official terminology by a 26 county state.
Hundreds of thousands of heart-sore northern nationalists heard themselves not just orphaned but exiled across some imaginary sea this week by a loose-talking Leo Varadkar. Better laugh at this, not cry or rage, but also make a note; another note.
Lippy Leo is the other Varadkar, not the leaderly if temporary taoiseach, part of a team, provided with telling set-piece speeches. Underneath the mantle of statesmanship conferred by crisis, Varadkar is still sore from February’s election. Dáil exchanges with Mary Lou McDonald bring out the gurrier in the most combative of Fine Gaelers.
Tarring Sinn Féin with standing over much-meaner northern benefits is a nerve, from someone who smeared those who lie in bed while the deserving get up early.
Fate gave him a smack, deservedly, when jeering at northern Sinn Féin ministers chasing publicity for giving out food parcels ‘to the poor’ ran right into pictures of one of his own ministers posing winningly with deliveries.
An interview with Pat Kenny found him still untethered. ‘Overseas’ membership, as in Belfast? Who knows where his head was, although he has since apologised.
And yet the force is with him, a popular yearning to sustain hope against fear. To northern watchers, the daily line-up of medics and ministers in Dublin has held up some kind of confidence and at least a sense of competence – easily out-performing London’s shifts and confusion.
The rate of infection and of death in care homes across this island is the dark shadow across that competence.
Tetchy SF tweeters, intent on pointing up Varadkar’s offences, lit on an Irish Times caption– among otherwise finely-written small biographies – that said one of those who have died with the virus had ‘left Ireland to work in Newcastle, Northern Ireland.’
The caption did not appear in the print edition and at a guess, Leo’s loose talk went right past most in the Republic.
Northern nationalists must chew their renewed grievance and swallow it, in the knowledge that northern unionists have similar fears. In a shaken Great Britain, approaches to loosening up the lockdown were bound to bring clashes.
No wonder there were tart responses in Edinburgh and Cardiff, determination to stick with ‘Stay at Home’.
Tempers were bound to rise, given that Boris Johnson’s cabinet learned the boss had taped his Sunday evening speech on the way ahead before he met them to explain what ‘Stay Alert’ means.
At least some of those who heard Boris talking about ‘the nation’ and assumed he meant the UK must then have realised he was only talking about England.
‘We would like the whole of the UK to move as one’, said the hapless minister sent out to the Marr show on Sunday morning, minus a briefing from the boss. So why then, said Marr, did Scotland’s first minister find out about the new slogan in the Sunday papers?
The ‘Ireland/N. Ireland’ stuff is irksome, flat contradiction of that reassurance about never again being left behind, no more ‘betrayal’, all that invocation of the Good Friday Agreement.
Even a guarantee to honour EHIC cards into the future, remember? But then who’s going anywhere any time soon.
An adequate, even impressive taoiseach when prepped appropriately topples over when unsupported? These are hard times. Let us be kind.
