(Please note due to a reluctance to push certain media for reasons you’ll see below, I’m doing this independently of them. Therefore if you find it interesting and think it has value, please feel free to share a coin or two at https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/ewanmackenna. Also please note that if you are going through a tough financial time as so many are, I don’t want a cent. I’ve always written primarily to help those worst off, not to profit from them. Thank you. Ewan.)
On a summer’s eve back in July of 1985, two women were out walking near the village of Ballinspittle in County Cork, when they claimed to have witnessed a miracle. It involved a statue of the Virgin Mary sat in a road-side grotto, the very one they said they’d seen moving about.
Word spread fast, even if proof obviously never did.
Not that that ever mattered or was needed.
Rather than being sent to a doctor for some checks and balances, these two women had started a major fad that a large chunk of a supposedly educated nation wanted a piece of. Such was the interest, a committee had to be formed to deal with the swathes of visitors as, soon, the statue was drawing crowds of up to 8,000 each day to stare on at the lump of painted concrete doing what a lump of painted concrete tends to do. The tales from them were as bizarre as ridiculous, as more and more convinced themselves of what they wanted to believe, rather than what they could see.
One man suggested the hands of the statue had moved apart and then back together; some stated that the head and shoulders would sway; one woman told reporters she was sure it was going to collapse having tilted so far forwards, yet never once considered dodgy foundations or getting out of the way just in case; others noted that the face had changed to that of Christ before reverting back, depending on the hour of the day you popped down at. Even parts of the media that descended didn’t debunk this, rather said they’d seen it all too.
The narrative had been set and the flock followed the deluded and lunatic shepherds.
They all went with their hearts and not their heads; their ears and not their eyes.
It wasn’t even just there of course. Indeed the phenomenon created a cult far and wide based on a mob mentality where what was said loudest was therefore truth. In all, there were about 30 locations where statues moved, where saints appeared on the stains of church walls, where solid rock bled or tears trickled down the face of some holy stones. No peeled potato was safe from revealing an image of Jesus nailed to a cross on Golgotha.
The moral of that story?
We Irish are a stupidly suggestible people.
I was only a baby when the above took place but, upon hearing of it in later life, I laughed at a generation that to me seemed as thick as they were gullible, and where dissenting voices and logical counterpoints hardly seemed to exist. I often wondered how so many could buy into such nonsense, and how so few could call it out for what it clearly was.
Ultimately, my conclusion was it must have been an absurd time to be alive, and I was thankful we’d moved upwards.
I was wrong.
Turns out, we’d merely moved onwards.
For, as much as things change, they remain the same in little, old Ireland.
In fact recently I imagined my now infant nephew Oscar in a couple of decades asking about the time that Covid 19 paid a visit to our land. I reckon it’ll sadly go something like this…
“What was the old normal like, Ewan?”
“Well, you see the way you are sitting eight feet away from me, are scared to touch things, and wash your hands so often that you may not have fingerprints? It didn’t used to be like that. We used to spend summer days swimming in the canal, bobbing along with cow shite and pig shite and sheep shite and I’m fairly sure human shite. It got you by till evening when we’d head for the pub as it was simply known before it had to be associated with some level of moisture. And you’d get too lazy to wash your hands after a third trip to the urinal, and sit beside some fella who was equally as lazy and still you shared peanuts from a manky bowl.”
“Weren’t you worried you’d get sick? Where was the hygiene?”
“I’m fairly sure that’s why we didn’t get sick. Besides, the logic was what’s a little urine when you’re drinking five litres of beer. I’d a mate who used to say that if we drank that much water we’d be dead. Anyway, it got worse as if you had the energy for a club, the ambition involved getting the hands even less hygienic. Granted, best leave that there.”
“So what changed?”
“Covid happened.”
“It must have been brutal?”
“It wasn’t good and there were many tragedies but what was just as brutal was what society did to itself. They actually worked out that Covid came along many months before anyone knew, around October 2019, and it spread like crazy, and the hospitals were busy that Christmas without a single expert noticing anything about quantity or severity of illness and the public just shrugged and didn’t care. But then they gave it a name, and all hell broke loose. People panicked. So they queued within coughing distance of hundreds of others at supermarket entrances in order to get trolleys of bog roll. If they were going down, they were going down with the dignity of a clean arse.”
“Did you get scared?”
“Sure. They were showing videos of lads dropping dead on the sides of roads all over China and what did I know about medicine and virology. I trusted these people as they seemed so assured and their qualifications were intimidating.”
“Did those experts get scared then?”
“Strangely not. There was this one guy, Tony Holohan, who was the Chief Medical Officer and was solely known at that point for trying to bury the ruination of women with cervical cancer. He came straight out and said Cheltenham was safe. Regardless of tens of thousands of people betting and drinking and eating and dancing and riding on top of one another for four straight days, before cramming onto planes and boats to get back home, as being mostly outdoors took care of that risk he promised. There was this other fella called Sam McConkey and he said you couldn’t lock down as the economy comes first. Luke O’Neill was yet another and he said masks should only be for horror movies.”
“Why didn’t people listen to them?”
“They did, the problem was they all changed their minds when it turned out the virus had a tiny fraction of that danger level. Your risk of dying if you caught it went from seven and eight per cent to around 0.2 and 0.3 per cent. But despite that Holohan suddenly didn’t want anyone meeting anywhere, ever. McConkey thought there should be five years of lockdowns. O’Neill was big on double-masking within months. They preached and the congregation sang.”
“Why? Didn’t anyone look at the numbers and think for themselves?”
“The problem was it was a perfect storm. Ireland was a society that was both soft and scared, both needy and greedy, both crazy and deranged. You’d the egos of medics loving attention; academics battling for notoriety via hysteria and hyperbole; a dunce political class out of their depth and trying to save their own skins by saying they could only listen to the experts; a media loving the clicks and attention and the profits of fear-porn; and a whack of people happy to sit at home on full pay and call out anyone that suggested another way to see out the storm.”
“Was there another way?”
“To a degree although it was a pandemic so people were always going to die, even if the mortality of our species suddenly stunned some. But exercise helped as the more healthy you were, the better chance you had of surviving.”
“So people flocked to the gyms?”
“No they closed them.”
“What about playing sport?”
“That was banned too.”
“Didn’t anyone speak out?”
“One or two.”
“And what happened?”
“They were put in their place. One doctor called Martin Feeley talked some alternatives based on facts and data and science on RTÉ one night and was made an example of as a warning. He got bullied and pressured out of his job in the HSE and was never seen on TV again. Good healthy scientific discourse, and all pushed by many journalists that saw themselves as morally and intellectually superior when the reality was the exact opposite. In those spheres, if you didn’t post pictures of yourself wearing masks or change your middle name on social media to “we can be Zero Covid”, “wash your hands” or some similar sanctimonious, meaningless pap, then you were done for. So everyone fell into line. And marched off the cliff. Granted, that suicidal group-think only emerged further down the tracks.”
“So what came first?”
“The nursing homes. And the first slivers and signs of madness.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the most vulnerable were there, but Tony Holohan and the best minds thought it would be a good idea to take people with Covid from hospitals and move them back in and spread it about. And then doctors started to put do not resuscitate orders on people when the inevitable happened.”
“The population must have been furious?”
“God no, they said everything done was down to compassion, and protecting the elderly, and painted murals of Tony Holohan dressed as Superman and said only he could save us.”
“Where were the politicians?”
“Well the Taoiseach at that moment was Leo Varadkar. He was a doctor, and went to hospital to help out.”
“Wow, he treated patients and risked himself in the chaos?”
“Oh no, you have me wrong. He got in the way by bringing a PR team to take photos of him answering phones as others actually tried to work. Meanwhile the Minister for Health at that time was Simon Harris but he couldn’t find time to meet with the nursing homes leaders to formulate a plan as he was doing the children’s news on the television.”
“Were people mad at him?”
“Quite the opposite. A year earlier he’d been threatening striking nurses in the rain with the dole queue, but then he told everyone to clap for them and said they were heroes as well. Problem solved. But anyway, after the initial chaos came the calm as the summer of 2020 arrived and numbers thankfully collapsed across Europe and didn’t go up when everything re-opened.”
“It must have been a good summer in Ireland after all that?”
“Apologies, that was Europe.”
“We are in Europe?”
“Geographically, but we went it alone on this despite the obvious. We kept 350,000 people out of work that summer and kept the fear going and many restrictions in place.”
“How did people put up with that?”
“For two reasons. Those that got mad had social media to get rid of it. After the big bang, after suns exploded and planets collided, after earth was formed and dinosaurs came and an asteroid strike wiped them out and created the perfect climate for humans to evolve and grow wise and create technology, we’d reached a point in that process where you could go online and call Mike1546332346453 a complete and utter c*nt. Those folk were in a minority though. The majority were tricked by the brilliance of the government. They hired marketing firm after marketing firm and came up with a hashtag. ‘All in this together.’ That was enough for most people to stare blankly as rights were removed.”
“So you weren’t all in it together?”
“Not exactly. When they brought in restrictions, the first thing the politicians and judges and media did was break them by having a golf get-together and a dinner party and piss up. RTÉ even threw a party against the rules too and had the brains to take photographic evidence of this, all the while telling others to never, ever break those rules.”
“People still weren’t mad?”
“Not really. There were around 80 at that golf do but people got their one sacrificial lamb and went back to their TVs and were scared some more. Slowly, it became about Paul Reid of the HSE on €8,000 a week and Tony Holohan on €6,000 a week telling the populous it wasn’t safe for them to have basic rights. And Michéal Martin on €4,000 a week said he could do no more than listen to them despite being leader. And Ryan Tubridy on €9,000 a week, Miriam O’Callaghan on €6,000 a week, and Claire Byrne on €5,000 a week told everyone they were feeling the effects too, and demanded the rest be happy with €300 or so of a pandemic support payment despite no guarantee their job would ever be back or their roof would remain over their head or there’d be food on the table the next week.”
“And if the masses didn’t accept those demands?”
“They were demeaned, ridiculed, abused, and had the population turned on them.”
“What kind of abuse?”
“If you went outside and protested because you were worried and stressed, they suggested you were the sort of person that followed the politics of the Nazi party.”
“All because they wanted to work?”
“All because many in our media and a lot of others controlling the narrative couldn’t understand how bad it had got for some and that Covid was far from their biggest worry and they were willing to take the risk of it to solve what were more pressing problems for them. They were called conspiracy theorists but those doing the name-calling didn’t have the brains to work out that conspiracies are formed when what’s taking place doesn’t add up and makes no sense thus with no rational explanation they become irrational. Disinformation was another buzzword that became en vogue to humiliate them as well. So if people said the media lied and had agendas and bias, if they said Vitamin D could be used to help your immune system a little to fight this, if they said this would all lead to a vaccine passport just to have the right to travel, this was conspiracy and disinformation and made you a Nazi.”
“So people really thought those things?”
“Well yeah. And they all turned out to be true.”
“So it wasn’t disinformation?”
“Disinformation was a fluid term. It was more about having some views that went against the cosy cartel. Now don’t get me wrong, there were some real nutters as there always has been and always will be. But to be honest they turned out to be no more mad than those who were happy to sit at home for the rest of their days because they thought stepping out the door would see them spontaneously combust.”
“Was there an apology to those they said were conspiracy theorists, but who were right?”
“No, no. It was ignored, and those happy with the narrative would move onto the next way to discredit what didn’t suit. Strange times. Journalists would drive around bemoaning traffic as if Covid meant the road network was now their personal space. The politicians doubled down too on those who had dared to exercise a democratic right and a desperation. Especially the left. There was one guy for example, Paul Murphy, who was at infamous protests a few years before and when asked about law-breaking then said people needed to understand the fury of the working class. Yet when the working class got furious over this he went for them in the most withering terms. Those that were comfortable never got how others were hurting. They would say what harm is a lockdown and equate it to a seat belt. Only there’s no downside to a seatbelt.”
“So locking down did damage?”
“Huge amounts. Other illnesses weren’t treated, doctors wouldn’t see patients, mental health collapsed, kids didn’t get educated, children’s social development was badly damaged, the elderly died alone, the third world grew by tens of millions, and the cuts that followed of course hit those worst off when there were so many that were suddenly worse off. All the while the rich got richer. It’s why the WHO begged not to use lockdowns as a primary go-to in any country.”
“So what did Ireland do?”
“Locked down longer than anywhere.”
“Why?”
“The prevailing lack of wisdom became that if you didn’t, Covid would run wild.”
“Would it?”
“That depends. Over 30 papers from top institutes and the best scientists in the world showed that it would increase naturally, peak, and fall naturally and intervention didn’t matter much. Basically there was no keeping it out. One paper in Ireland showed that when it got real bad, that surge started in lockdown but everyone pretended that wasn’t the case.”
“But scientists like data, they must’ve had something to say?”
“In Ireland, they liked funding more than data. Tony Holohan’s sister-in-law was one of those working on Covid projects in UCD that saw €6m go their way; the wife of Michael Ryan of the WHO was one of those that saw €10m go their way via the university in Galway; and soon they all wanted in and the scarier they made it sound and the more they screamed this would be never-ending without their brilliance, the better chance they had of money.”
“They sound awful.”
“You’ve no idea. These are the sort of people so detached from real life that they didn’t notice the difference in lock down. It was their wet dream. The world had become their laboratory. They thought we all wanted to get back to hugging in the park rather than scrapping outside a chip shop. They thought the summer gigs at Slane Castle involved sitting neatly on a mat taking in the sounds from the stage and applauding. Truly terrible folk who knew more and more about less and less until they disappeared up their own hole.”
“Were there many of them?”
“More than you want to know. But our most prominent group were called ISAG. They thought the lockdowns weren’t harsh enough or hard enough and they were willing to do anything to get their way. Rig any discussion to humiliate their critics. Play the media game with soft-sop journalists. Lie to the Taoiseach. Destroy mental health further. Anything. And all that came out as fact in leaked emails which should have seen them ruined as academics.”
“The media must have hated that sort of disinformation and called them far right too?”
“You’d think that but they were on every radio station and television channel and newspaper page daily.”
“Were they asked about those emails?”
“Nope.”
“And what about their plan?”
“It involved quarantining people forever more if they came from abroad, illegally closing the border with Northern Ireland, and turning several Irish counties in buffer zones with second-class citizens unless they could convince rioting Loyalists to join a united Irish approach and be led by idiocy in Dublin.”
“Were they grilled over that?”
“Nope.”
“The opposition were left-wing or said they were. If lockdowns made poverty worse and increased social divide and had honest people struggling, they must’ve highlighted ISAG and the threat they posed?”
“Actually they supported them.”
“What? Why?”
“They made a mistake and then wouldn’t back down or admit their mistake no matter the damage to others. Basically they were like a person betting on a horse in the Grand National, seeing that horse fall at the first fence and have a tent placed around them as they were shot dead. So they’d run down to the bookies, and put more money on that horse mid-race. And still the likes of Labour and Sinn Féin sat across the house and complained about the economic situation and unemployment while supporting ISAG and these harsher restrictions.”
“Did the media like the opposition then because they liked ISAG?”
“No. They hated them.”
“Why?”
“Because key people were in bed with Fianna Fail and particularly Fine Gael. That was some government that essentially amounted to two identical twins that thought the other was ugly yet they were beautiful. They couldn’t stand one another but were the same.”
“So why go into government together.”
“Power. And money.”
“What were they like?
“They were like a lad who couldn’t walk down the road without putting his clog in a steaming pile of dog shite. They couldn’t help themselves. That fella Simon Harris I mentioned became minister for higher education and used to walk around all day like a 12-year-old making Tik Tok videos of every dull thing he did. His successor in health was Stephen Donnelly who when numbers were low wanted proof of everything you’d eaten; at the worst of the crisis was specifically worried about why he wasn’t mentioned more on social media and had a report commissioned; and eventually used the dislike of him to have a fence erected around his house for security, one he had been refused planning permission for previously. The Taoiseach couldn’t follow the rules because he may not have been able to understand them and repeatedly breached them. The Tanaiste was under criminal investigation. The Minister for Transport wanted to ruin aviation but keep hardware stores open so he could grow lettuce out his south-facing window and paint the gable end of his highly-priced suburban home, while planning on releasing wolves into the wild. The spokesperson for equality saw her family’s company get a non-tendered €12.5m from the government to recruit nurses on zero-hour contracts. And the big issues of the day included stopping the recording of Gardaí in the wake of police being recorded in America getting some justice for George Floyd, making a glass of champagne at a bridal dress fitting a criminal offence, and putting bar codes linked to passports on McDonald’s bags so if they were found in a ditch they could come and get you. That last one was courtesy of a public representative that had shoved a Twix up the anus of an unconscious man yet who the government thought should be nominated for the Seanad to rule over us.”
“Weren’t the media critical of any of that?”
“Not really?”
“Why?”
“They’d bigger fish to fry.”
“What could be worse than that?”
“Brace yourself. Sinn Féin had an internet server in Germany. You’ll never get it. I still don’t. Besides, they’d realised the money was in becoming S&M journalism. Tuning into some shows became like being chained upside-down in a Berlin dungeon and having your testicles mangled with a bull whip. The torture dollar. RTÉ furloughed half their staff, kept their stars, and turned a profit for the first time in memory. The media made €8m from the taxpayer in ads telling you to wash your hands. They went all in. You’d professors in inflated bubbles talking to each other; you’d Arctic explorers telling you how to survive dining outside; you’d experts telling you to put your 90-year-old grandmother by an open window for Christmas dinner despite it being minus-five with gale-force winds; you’d articles about how these experts were celebrities. They’d stumbled onto the hardly-new business idea that bullshitting people is a lucrative market.”
“Okay, but what about the people, surely they could see this for what it was?”
“No, by then they’d been paralysed with fear. That or they were woke.”
“What’s woke?”
“It means you’re an arrogant and pretentious, self-serving toolbar but disguise all that with some attention-grabbing and obvious suggestion that you are for the greater good.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Look at it this way. They were the people that rightly marched for Black Lives Matter but claimed anyone marching against lockdown was spreading Covid. They spoke about poverty and homelessness and social division for years until they supported lockdown which caused all that because they suddenly were at a tiny risk. They said things like ‘Covid is a racial issue’ or ‘Covid effects women and shows sexism’ despite the fact it killed more men which was a slight inconvenience to the deceased. They demanded freedom of speech until you said what they didn’t like. When there was an abortion referendum they talked about my-body-my-choice but when there were vaccines, they insisted you insert what they wanted into your body. And after all that they spoke of constructive dialogue and tweeted stuff like ‘be kind’ until you’d a counterpoint they struggled with so they got seriously nasty and abusive and vicious.”
“And what was their thinking?”
“Me, me, me. They were safe, they were comfortable, they were saving, they were fine. And they defended it by saying that if we don’t lockdown, we might need to lockdown and we can’t risk locking down. And after that incredible bit of mental gymnastics they still thought they’d a superior intellect that must be listened to for the good of humanity.”
“Lucky the vaccine came, so.”
“Not really. That made things worse.”
“What?”
“Anything good that came along wasn’t an immovable object as some irresistible force of bad came along conveniently too. There was big Covid and small Covid, short Covid and long Covid, round-bailed-and-wrapped Covid. Anything you wanted, you could get it. And people would huddle in ones around their televisions every night and shudder at the news that some poor, unfortunate 94-year-old riddled with cancer had passed away seven week’s earlier and go and check the lock was on the door and mutter about the real Big C. Previously rational, logical people, yet if some dredged-up expert suggested they go out into the garden, strip naked, dig a hole and stick their head in it, they would have. And that’s before we even got to the variants. That took it to another level again. It was relentless.”
“Variants?”
“Oh yes. That was a stick to beat you with come 2021. There’d been thousands of these things but then they realised the power of them to keep you in check. So first there was the British variant and then the South African variant, and then the Brazilian variant, and then came the Indian double variant which it seemed certain people wouldn’t be happy with until it crawled out of the Bay of Bengal in the form of the T-1000 and started chasing you with sharp, metal claws.”
“Did the vaccines not work on them?”
“They did for severe illness but making that clear would have calmed nerves. You’d even a doctor from NPHET telling a court in Ireland a flat-out untruth about that in order to keep a healthcare worker that was fully vaccinated and that had a negative test in forced hotel quarantine.”
“Quarantine?”
“Yeah, they brought that in after a year when the bloody thing was rampant in Ireland because of public pressure. Was €2,000 in a hotel room because you came into the country. And you’d be stuck there for a fortnight. But the woke brigade demanded we be like New Zealand, never realising that ship had sailed and that we share a border and that there was a vaccine by then, and that New Zealand had its hospital system nearly collapse via such measures. And they got their way. And then they pissed and moaned at the obvious consequence of their demands when people were stuck and couldn’t make funerals. And they saw no issue when others were allowed bypass it as long as it was for some far more vital cause like a game of rugby between two amateur women’s teams. That was seemingly worth the risk.”
“Did the government have any other plans? Any good plans?”
“They spent months coming up with a Living With Covid plan?”
“What was in that?”
“How to die without Covid. Nothing more. No dates. No promises. No numbers. No way forward. No hope. It was about seven-day incidence rate and when that was good it was about 14-day incidence rate and when that was good it was about the R number and when that was good it was about waiting lists or hospital numbers or whatever worked. At one point when ICUs were full, Leo Varadkar kicked the can way down the road and said there’d be no re-opening until there were less than 50 people in there. Two months later there were 48, yet the posts moved. They always moved. At that point he then said they needed months more to wait and see what to do next.”
“Of course there were less in hospital though once the vulnerable got vaccinated, surely?”
“Yeah, although that took a while. One area the media liked to highlight was anti-vaxxers and associated this with disinformation and the far right. Except then many of the experts started panicking when one in a million died from a vaccine side-effect and scared everyone about the cure. It was psychosis by then rather than science. And you’ve to understand that it reached the level of brain-washing where I knew of people that would go five kilometres from their house and have the GPS on so they wouldn’t go an inch further. Some would wash their shopping bags. One woman took off the clothes she went shopping in with disposable gloves and washed them. One family only ate canned food which they’d leave in the garage for weeks before use ‘so the Covid would be gone off of it’. Another family didn’t let their kids open their Christmas presents until February so the virus wouldn’t be a risk. Wall-turning was a great move when you met someone in the street. And there was an army going around filming others for being in a place they never considered they were also in, and they’d ring up Liveline or Pat Kenny to tell of two people not spaced to their liking or a lad removing his mask to take a bite of a sandwich as if this would mean human extinction. It became clear why the British managed to rule over Ireland for 800 years with about 50 soldiers.”
“What was it like elsewhere?”
“In Texas they’d 49,000 packed into a baseball game and everything was opened but numbers didn’t budge. In Amsterdam they’d 5,000 at a soccer match drinking away. Portugal pulled the restrictions. Barcelona had concerts. Life went on elsewhere. And it was largely fine as the vaccines kept the vulnerable safe and some tragically died but many others thankfully got back to living. But Ireland said not yet, hold firm, two more weeks, be cautious.”
“Did no one think about the bill.”
“Why would they? Politicians gave themselves four pay rises, civil servants got three, and those who’d given up nothing – or actually gained – fought over who should get the vaccine first regardless of whether that put someone else with a greater risk at a greater risk and they still claimed that we were all in it together. The one in four out of work didn’t matter, the highest debt in the EU didn’t matter, and those doing well suggested the roaring 20s would follow when in fact vital services were going to be pulled and the real hardship was awaiting.”
“Had they never seen financial mismanagement and collapse before.”
“They had, a decade earlier, and completely forgot. But for many, and for many months, the idea in their heads was that there’d be a new world order and a new way of life and if they could only take a dump in their own house forever more then their jacks would be more opulent than yours, and if we were going to live off Lidl rations for the rest of time then they’d get some coupons for the Deluxe range on the side. Others weren’t so lucky. It’s all pretty much the reason you’re stuck in a crap job in Amazon with your pay cheque disappearing down the hole of social charges despite getting nothing back in services.
“Sounds like a stupid time to be alive.”
“It was.”
“At least we got better Ewan. Anyway, did you hear Mrs Maguire saw that statue out the road lepping about. There’s a big socially-distanced crowd already. Fancy heading down?”
“Why not? At least this doesn’t hurt anyone else.”
“Do wash your hands before we go though, will you?”
“Ah Oscar, would you ever fu…”
28 April, 2021
Ewan MacKenna 
What a time to be alive. The lunatics have well and truly taken over the asylum.
Thanks for this.