We know Micheál is cautious. His trademark is looking concerned. So we take that for granted. But when Leo is seeming concerned, we get a bit worried.
Leo used to be the champion of the opening up gang. It was Leo who infamously called out Tony Holohan before Christmas, but, courtesy of what we now call the Alpha variant, Tony won that round, if anyone could be described as a winner out of what happened in January and February.
You wonder if Leo, like his colleagues, and maybe like all of us, is traumatised in some way by what happened back then. Maybe while we all try to look coldly at what faces us now, we are too haunted by the last time we took any kind of a risk.
Paul Reid certainly seems to be. He barely gives a press conference these days without talking gloomily about what he likes to call “the dark days of January and February”, and his determination not to go back there.
Right now, with a third of 1pc, one in 300, of our hospital beds taken up with Covid patients, the dark days seem a long way off, but then, we know how quickly things can change.
None of us wants to go back. But people are starting to wonder. Does our determination not to go back mean that we can’t go forward either? Are we trapped here forever in this outdoor summer?
Leo Varadkar is even echoing the CMO’s language now, talking of Delta as “the dark cloud”.
Of course, you’ll rarely get a completely blue sky in Ireland, and if you do, it doesn’t last long. You don’t plan a picnic for tomorrow in Ireland, or a barbecue for next week. You have to go down to the wire before planning anything.
And it looks like it’ll be lastminute.com for indoor hospitality and foreign holidays this summer. Kegs will be poised to roll into pubs next Thursday, choppers hovering over chickens, ready to make goujons and mild Thai curries out of them.
What looks like reasonable caution to medics, is starting to look like recklessness to some of those who need to make an honest buck to survive.
Some can’t help feeling that each time we nearly get there, they think of something else to hold us back. Some people are getting brave now, and starting to talk about “scaremongering”. But equally, everyone is conscious that just because we want this to be over now doesn’t mean it’s over.
But then, when is it over? When we are all vaccinated? The suggestion of waiting a few weeks to open up is that we should get more people vaccinated. But ask anyone who is fully vaccinated if it feels like it’s over to them?
That sweet freedom we thought the vaccinations would bring hasn’t come. Now it seems we have to wait for everyone to be done. And especially the vulnerable, many of whom, the 60-somethings, it turns out, are still not protected. We had one job in all this. Protect the vulnerable. We failed to do it in the nursing homes, we failed to do it in January and we still haven’t quite got there.
So are we there yet? Problem is, we won’t know until we know. Let’s hope we don’t find out the hard way.
