The Irish, it's fair to say, have performed a lot better than the UK in this crisis. That's almost completely down to a divergence in political ideology. Your establishment political class are being kept honest by having Sinn Fein breathing down their necks ready to pounce on any catastrophic error in leaving your population exposed. We have the insipid Starmer zombie LP.
I'll bet there's no equivalent over there in Fine Gael/Fianna Fail to the corporate-fascist group the 'Covid Recovery Group'...an abomination that has traction inside the Tory Party, even after 116,000 incidents of social murder.
We've done ok mate relative to our population. We took a very risk adverse approach overall and got the majority of the big calls right. The biggest mistake we made was around the third wave here - as we call it - basically Xmas.
We got the timing right around the second lockdown in Nov, but lifted it far to early and liberally Xmas week had a massive two week jolly over Xmas and cases sky rocketed after to our worst period in the whole pandemic. To be fair it coincided with the advent of the UK variant that got here at that time, 7 times more transmissible and we didn't see it coming. The UK variant is now the dominant variant here and accounts for over 70% of all our cases. So we now have to deal with that, its super Covid really and cases are stubbornly refusing to come down at the same rate as before and we are bouncing between 500-1000 a day.
Politically like i said we are pretty risk adverse and compliant, though the natives like everywhere are getting restless and like most places i think we take a cautious unravelling of deconstructing lock down about late March slowly. Politically here, Sinn Fein will be the next government, the two dominant parties historically are in coalition for the first time ever to keep Sinn Fein out - but i think in doing that they have signed their own death warrant, so i expect a Sinn Fein government in the next cycle. To be honest Sinn Fein arent breaking rank to much, we have the unusual position here that they are in government in the North, so if things haven't been going well there - which they haven't then they cant be too critical of what going on in the Republic.
We have a few right wing crazys, challenging civil liberties in the high court and refusing to wear mask protests etc., but generally they are just comical.
We will be alright, im happy with our roll out to be honest - everyone wants it yesterday but for me we have made the right fundamental calls and will be grand come the summer.
On the UK, there are brilliant underappreciated minds in the NHS, i put the success of the rollout down to them, its why i said im delighted they have had the opportunity to roll out on it and they are hugely competent despite challenges. Im delighted for the UK that it is the NHS leading this as id have concerns about the scientists in the UK - the lads who first brought us herd immunity when this kicked off and a big risk that may or may not pay off with the one dose strategy & the government, they haven't dealt with this at all well top to bottom. The vaccine piece might pay off, but i was reading yesterday that the UK waived all liability of any negative impact of the vaccines in order to get early doses - again that might be grand, but if i had a bad impact to a vaccine id want some recourse, the EU have it.
But i also understand the UK's position they've been hit the hardest by this virus in Europe and had an awful time with cases and deaths, if you were to pick one country in Europe who you would want to prioritize for the the vaccine and get it rolled out quickly its the UK, thanksfully and mercifully that seems to be the case, so that's a great news story and good for us all in western Europe. I just hope the NHS arent forgotten in all of this when or if it gets more normal.
