Cassandra Voices

Category: Covid 19

  • The Oxford Covid Debate

    On November 19 the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) hosted one of the first genuine debates on Covid policies. The nature of the debate, the issues discussed and the responses since, are all revealing as to where the last five years have brought public engagement on difficult topics – and how painful that time has been.

    CAF invited to the debate two speakers who had at the time been critical of Covid policies from a left-wing perspective: Sunetra Gupta (Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford, and co-signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration) and myself, Toby Green, a Professor of African history; along with two speakers who had been critical of the critics: UCL Clinical Professor of Intensive Care Medicine Hugh Montgomery (who at one time famously claimed people not amending their routines had ‘blood on their hands’) and Guardian journalist and medical historian Mark Honigsbaum. The chair, reproductive biologist and an advocate for public-facing science Güneş Taylor had a tough job on her hands, which she performed with aplomb.

    Several things are important to note about the discussion. First is that there were some clear areas of agreement. Britain certainly got the issue of school closures wrong, along with the rest of the world. The fraught nature of the Covid crisis was exacerbated by the failure to prepare adequately for medical emergencies in the West through building spare capacity in health services rather than using a ‘just-in-time’ model based on neoliberal economics. The shutting down of debate was widely agreed to have been a serious problem, and to have exacerbated mistrust in government and the crisis of misinformation (or information saturation); moreover the systematic failure in previous decades to have proper debates about social values related to death, and how society should in fact approach end of life in an ageing population, contributed to the discourse collapse.

    What was also encouraging in the debate was that there was some evidence of ability to listen and change opinion. Hugh Montgomery said that he had changed his mind on some topics over the evening. I too was also touched by his discussion and that of a nurse in the audience of the genuine fear and stress felt by medical staff at the outset of the crisis.

    All participants agreed on the social cost of the lockdown measures. Almost inevitably, however, this was where the differences were ignited. Did those catastrophic costs make them unjustifiable? Mark Honigsbaum thought they had become inevitable once China began to build its quarantine camps, citing the oft-quoted projection of Imperial College modeller Neil Ferguson that locking down a week earlier would have saved 20,000 lives in the U.K. alone – a quote repeated the very next day on the publication of Baroness Hallett’s Covid Inquiry report in the U.K.. In spite of strong disagreements on this, what was striking was also the breadth of the debate, even on lockdowns: where did lockdowns sit on the scale of values as compared to our debts to the young, the kind of society we wish to live in, and the immense rupture which Covid had brought to people’s digital habits and mental health – already acknowledged as a serious problem for the young prior to lockdowns and digital ‘learning’?

    If, as I pointed out, evidence suggested that over the long haul of an eighteen-month pandemic, fatality rates were very similar in lockdown and non-lockdown cases, what was the lockdown for? If it offered to buy a limited window of time to bring in PPE equipment and protect frontline medical staff, this could perhaps for a short time be justified (and here too there was some agreement). Nevertheless, it remains my view that had we invested sufficiently in primary healthcare pre-Covid there would not have been the same sense of panic, and such a dramatic suspension of basic civil liberties would have been unnecessary.

    What was encouraging about the debate itself was its breadth. Though at times the participants diverged into their 2020 camps, there were broader discussions about social change, the current systemic and social crisis, and the young – all the kinds of discussion that were systematically shut down in 2020. This itself was positive, and while in his Substack summary of the event Honigsbaum reverted to the lockdown for-and-against discussion, which had been just a part of what was debated that night, this breadth of debate and evidence of listening was something that, as one of the participants said later, restored their faith in humanity.

    What was also fascinating about the event was the audience, which was almost entirely anti-lockdown, as Honigsbaum noted in his ‘post-match report’. As indeed he also said, it was also difficult to find anyone to debate the pro-lockdown position. Therefore, he must be thanked for agreeing to participate. It is also hard, it seems, to get those who aggressively supported the measures to attend and engage in a post-mortem. Is this because people hate being proven wrong in such a massive way? Or is it because they still hunker down in an algorithmic silo contending that debating an issue will give succour to the ‘far right’ (by which, unless they are really disturbed, they cannot mean Sunetra Gupta and me)? Whether it is for both reasons is for the reader to decide.

    At this stage, sadly, it seems that one person’s far right is another person’s far left on so many issues – and this itself is symptomatic of the systemic social crisis we now face in the West. What is clear is that, as I said in my closing remarks, unless we are prepared to listen better to each other, and discuss the moral and political crisis we are living through openly and without judgement, all of us will pay the price.

    In conclusion, I provide the answers I prepared for Güneş Taylor’s questions for the Oxford debate – most of which, in some form or other, I tried to get across.

    Opening comments  in response to the title of ‘What did Britain get right and wrong during the Covid-19 pandemic?’

    One thing we got wrong: this is pretty hard to choose, to be honest, as I think so many things were got wrong. I would emphasise especially here the jettisoning of previous pandemic plans which led to many of the subsequent crises – and corruption in contracts, as responses were being made up on the back of an envelope. Many figures who worked extremely hard on those previous plans, such as Lucy Easthope and Robert Dingwall, have emphasised the extent to which they were ignored. I would also mention the inhumane cruelty of isolating care home residents in the last months of their lives and depriving them of contact with their families – where the life expectancy of someone entering a care home is about one year. This is as cruel as you can be.

    My focus will be on something broader here, as I will zoom in on more details later: the lack of debate. The shutting down of debate by public service broadcasters and social media platforms was nothing short of a catastrophe. It has contributed to many of the subsequent catastrophes. In particular, the lack of trust in government and media today – which links to the increasing appeal of Populism. So, I want to thank my fellow panellists this evening for being here and enabling this event to happen. We may have strong disagreements, but we are willing to air them in public, to try to understand each other’s perspectives, and thereby to understand what happened so much better. It’s quite shocking that this appears to be the first such event that has taken place in the U.K., and that it has taken five years to have it.

    It was also pretty hard to think of one thing that we got right in the U.K., but eventually I did remember one. It was the decision not to lock down in the December of 2021 during the Omicron wave. There was a huge amount of pressure, and The Guardian reported that we might have two million cases a day by New Year. In the end, the peak was at a little over 200,000, so this was an exaggeration of 1000% – not the first time this happened during the pandemic; with the misrepresentation of PCR testing as a diagnostic tool rather than a laboratory test giving the impression things were much worse than they were. And afterwards, many media “experts” such as Jeremy Vine intoned that they “had not realised” that “people adapted their behaviour automatically” at times of health crises – even though this was precisely what Sweden had said, under Anders Tegnell, in the spring of 2020, when deciding not to lock down.

    As it was things were already bad. On a call with a practising G.P. that winter, he told me that he was the only emergency G.P. in a city the size of Oxford, because everyone else had been called in for the booster rollout.

    A student put it to me like this: “If we lock down again, it’s going to mean more weeks doing my classes on the stairs.” The enormously regressive impacts – as a 2022 Sutton Trust study showed – of education lockdowns meant that advances in educational outcomes among the poorer sectors of the population had been reversed by ten years. We also cannot easily estimate the health costs of taking these measures, including pathological loneliness, and missed diagnoses.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    What measures were taken e.g. masks, vaccine passports etc? Did they ‘work’? How were Covid deaths measured? Could more lives have been saved through earlier and longer lockdowns? 

    There is no evidence that more lives would have been saved by earlier and longer lockdowns. A new book by Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo, In Covid’s Wake, shows no discernible difference in Covid mortality pre-vaccine between U.S. States which locked down and those which did not. Meanwhile, excess deaths in Sweden were among the lowest in the OECD between 2020 and 2022, comparable with its much-lauded neighbours. [Editor’s Note: according to this 2023 OECD report: Notably, Sweden, which was under the spotlight at the beginning of the pandemic, saw excess mortality among 65+ age group below the OECD average in 2020 and negative in 2021 and 2022, as well as overall.]

    And this is the key statistic, overall societal deaths, for the precise reason that measurement of who died ’from’ or ‘with’ Covid is so unreliable. In April 2020, the WHO changed the definition of death from Covid to someone who had a positive PCR within 28 days or just the suspicion of Covid. Peru changed its means of measuring Covid deaths after 18 months, for instance, which suddenly gave it far and away the world’s worst per capita mortality figure; in Italy it was the reverse, and in November 2021 the Italian ministry of health revised figures to show the numbers who had died without any comorbidities as dying “of Covid”, which was very small (under 4000). Indeed, at one point Priti Patel went on TV to try to argue that Covid mortality was lower than stated because of the comorbidities – and this was probably true, since Neil Ferguson himself had said quite early in the pandemic that a third of those who died of Covid would probably have died within the next year anyway.

    In effect, politicians became prisoners of statistics. This also led to the focus on vaccines and vaccine passports, even after the Associate Editor of the BMJ Peter Doshi  reported in the BMJ in October 2020 that the vaccines were not being studied to determine whether they would interrupt transmission, so could not guarantee a sterilising vaccine. Given the history of vaccination and its connection to colonial power in Africa and racialised experimentations in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, vaccine passports were nothing short of racist and discriminatory – and scientifically illegitimate, given the fact this was not a sterilising vaccine, and never could have been.

    This global perspective points to another issue, which is the absurdity of focussing on lockdowns when so many other variables are at stake: health spending per capita, socioeconomic wealth, obesity, age pyramids of populations, other health priorities, and so on. Given the huge range of health variables, and global socioeconomic conditions, it really is extraordinary that a medieval policy – developed when the humoural theory of medicine was still in vogue – was rolled out again, and assumed to be fit for the entire world for eighteen months to two years. Cui bono? The billionaire class!

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    What was the cost of the measures taken? What have been the global ramifications of the pandemic and pandemic response? Its effect on healthcare, economy, civil liberties?

    The cost was a catastrophe, which no one wants to talk about. I remember an email which Sunetra Gupta and I received in April 2021 during the Delta Wave in India from a Human Rights lawyer working for a trade union in India – saying that literally millions of informal sector workers were starving by the roadside in the state of Uttar Pradesh alone. In the Philippines, children were not allowed to leave their homes for eighteen months – enormous increases in child abuse were reported.

    We often hear that all this was “caused by Covid”. But it wasn’t: it was caused by Covid measures. In November 2023, the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) stated that ‘50 million more people in Africa fell into extreme poverty as a result of Covid’. This is nonsense: the African continent registered less than 260,000 Covid deaths, and over 100,000 were in South Africa alone. Mortality was very low compared to other endemic diseases – as some predicted right from the start on a continent where the median age is around nineteen.

    But now, Africa is entering Structural Adjustment 2.0 according to the New Internationalist. This has been caused by inflation, and collapse of the informal and service sectors during 2020-1. Well documented mass food price increases had already been reported by the World Food Programme and Reuters by October 2020, long before the war in Ukraine – although that certainly hasn’t helped. The result is, OXFAM reports, that over half of Low Income Countries are reducing health and education spending in the next five years. That isn’t going to offer any help in “preventing the next pandemic”.

    We saw two years of school closures in countries like Honduras, India, and Uganda. There were 4.5 million schoolchildren alone removed from schooling in Uganda, leading to catastrophic increases in teenage marriage and forced labour. We also have a whole lost generations in India, as documented in Collateral Global’s film The Children of Nowhere.

    We saw a massive spike in gender-based violence, a ‘shadow pandemic’ as the UN Women’s Commissioner described it – with twenty years of progress in sexual health wiped out by the closure of clinics; the abused incarcerated with abusers; huge increases in prostitution; and the shuttering of informal markets which are the main source of income for many women in the Global South.

    We also saw a version of this in the West. Enormously elevated time was spent by adolescents online, which has led to increased consumption of violent pornography with devastating consequences.

    So, closer to home we can see the haemorrhaging of trust in public institutions and government In the UK. There have been huge protests around, for instance, Keir Starmer’s policy of cutting winter fuel payments to many pensioners, saving around £1.5 billion. Yet we have had no debate around the £310-£410 billion spent on Covid policies, with bewildering figures such as £37 billion (the entire UK transport budget) allocated to track and trace – which the U.K. government’s own National Audit office estimates reduced cases by just 2-5%.

    Covid spending achieved very little, but it has meant that there is “No money left”. The worst of all – at least for those of us fortunate enough to be in this room – is the generalised collapse in hope and optimism for the future, as we can see all about us. It is this which is degenerating into polarisation, and social fragmentation.

    How should this experience shape our future responses to pandemics? E.g. Could the Great Barrington Declaration’s ‘focused protection’ strategy be applied to future pandemic preparedness? What lessons can history teach us about balancing public health, personal freedom and societal impact?

    In terms of how the experience should shape future policy, we held a conference funded by Collateral Global at King’s in 2023, which came up with some important recommendations signed by 25 scholars from across the Global South. I am going to share them here:

    :- The centrality of public investment in healthcare – especially primary healthcare and infrastructure – and in social welfare, to expand at times of need. The “just in time” model does not work for healthcare or social welfare, and is not “efficient” – this requires rethinking the privatisation of so many features of the state, as countries like Nicaragua and Sweden showed. In the end it was private pharmaceutical companies that profited. Astra Zeneca (branded as “the Oxford vaccine”) wasn’t supposed to be for profit but they altered that policy later on.

    :- Proportionality and the disaggregation of risk: people at Low risk of diseases in one country will not be the same in another – we need community-based healthcare, as the WHO’s 1978 Alma Ata declaration demanded, not top-down centralisation derived from a corporate management structure.

    :- The importance of an open and accurate flow of information: censorship quickly becomes misinformation and actively works against the public good.

    :- Attendance to socio-economic factors and the social determinants of disease: what works for residents of North Oxford does not work for residents of Peckham or Oldham – let alone for Lagos or Kinshasa.

    :- Awareness of the complexity of supply chains and the impacts that disruption can have in access to healthcare – transport restrictions can be catastrophic when they are required to get people to hospitals for regular medication, or to bring in medical equipment manufactured elsewhere.

    :- Awareness of how policies that aggravate inequality will exacerbate ill-health – as all previous research indicated, and as the Covid policies showed – with the biggest transfer of wealth in history from the poor to the rich, and subsequent prolonged increases in excess deaths in many countries long past the end of the pandemic.

    And this highlights the absurdity that those who opposed these measures such as Sunetra Gupta and myself were painted as “right-wing”, when the left has always favoured the opposite policy – the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor.

  • Manchurian Monkeys

    Acts of commission – such as an amputation of the wrong leg or a dose of morphine an order of magnitude higher than recommended – generally elicit moral outrage. This anger usually extends to the relatives of the deceased should the victim pass away. Based on figures from the U.S., where medical error is the third leading cause of death, we may infer that five thousands are dying each year occur as a result of medical examination or treatment in Ireland through either commission or omission. The likelihood is that the former outnumbers the latter (see Oops! Why Things Go Wrong: Understanding and Controlling Error by Niall Downey (Liffey Books, 2023))

    Over the course of the past century the medical profession has been responsible for horrendous, large scale acts of commission, usually in service of an ideology that made perfect sense at the time. Thus, various documentaries depict old Nazi or Japanese doctors recalling with rheumy eyed nostalgia ‘the good old days’; when everything made sense and boiling, freezing, vivisecting and poisoning human beings was all in a day’s work.

    Japanese Unit 731 inflicted unspeakable brutality on the population of China (Manchuria) and Korea. Their experiments were published in prestigious medical journals many of which were aware that the Manchurian monkey-subjects were in fact Chinese peasants (see Japan’s Infamous Unit 731 by Hal Green and Yuma Totani (Tuttle Classics, 2019). Many died during the experiments – one rarely survives vivisection – and the remainder were murdered before the laboratories were destroyed.

    Most will be familiar with accounts of the Nazi doctors – of whom a tiny fraction were put on trial at Nuremberg in 1947 – and from which we derive the Nuremberg Code on human experimentation. 50% of German doctors were members of the Nazi party in the early 1940s by which time the euthanasia programme were in full swing.

    Doctors’ trial, Nuremberg, 1946–1947.

    For the Greater Good?

    The rationale for carrying out much of this barbaric work was apparently ‘for the greater good’, clearly not of the subjects, but for those who held sway over life and death by virtue of their power. The academic brilliance of many of the Nazi doctors led to them being spirited away to the USA to prevent the Soviets accessing their genius. Many of today’s pharmaceutical companies benefitted from their discoveries, e.g. sulfanilamides, methadone, phenol to name but a few (See The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert Jay Lifton, Hachette Book Group, 1986).

    Of course it wasn’t only the Germans and Japanese who had a penchant for inflicting carnage on the human race; the USA’s own Fort Detrick was a bio-weapons development site, which has had several accidents since the 1960s (See Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick, by J. David McSwane Simon and Schuster, 2022). It was even cited in Professor Jeffry Sachs’ 2022 Lancet report concerning the possible source of Sars-CoV2.

    Less often discussed are acts of omission, unless one regards inordinately long waiting times for operations and treatments as omissions. These are not to be dismissed and would include the tragic deaths of children here in Ireland awaiting scoliosis surgery.

    The type of omission that we wish to speak about is perhaps more sinister and it doesn’t lend itself to explanations such as ‘scarce resources’ or ‘bureaucratic bumbling.’ Some omissions hint at a systemic evil.

    In 2020 at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic (a pandemic generated by fear and hysteria as much as illness), it was widely believed, and stated by the majority of family physicians, that there were no safe and effective treatments for the condition. After all, they had been told as much in a the guidelines that were issued by the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) in April 2020: ‘Care of the Covid-19 presumptive or test positive covid-19 patient at home, including management of the deteriorating patient.’ The document stated that 16% of those over eighty years could die and that 50% of deaths could occur in the community.

    Repurposed Drugs

    At that time, however, there was a growing number of doctors around the world using repurposed drugs, i.e. medications that were known to have effects outside of what they were designed to do, and that these features might be helpful to fighting this novel yet potentially deadly situation. This is referred to as ‘empirical treatment’ and doctors have been practising it for decades, if not centuries. Examples include the use of blood pressure tablets for headaches, aspirin in the treatment of heart attacks or sildenafil (Viagra). Many are eternally grateful for empiricism!

    To the long list of empirical treatments one should add hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and ivermectin (IVM). However, these once safe, cheap and readily available drugs were transformed by a sustained media campaign into potentially lethal, prohibitively expensive and scarce medicines. Debate around their possible merits bordered on the disavowal of heresy. Indeed, mentioning them on social media platforms resulted in suspension or banning as an army of so-called ‘fact-checkers’ protected the world from empiricism.

    Thus, the medical profession, scientists and public health officials abandoned critical faculties and moral courage and joined the mob to bray and bark out any nonsense fed to them by Anthony Fauci, Mike Ryan, Luke O’Neill and other such figures. None of whom had clinical responsibility for patients.

    Whilst all of this was unfolding there were people within the Health Service Executive (HSE) here in Ireland, and no doubt in many similar organisations around the world, who knew that repurposed drugs could have had a vital role to play. Indeed, Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India with over 241 million inhabitants, made readily available, take-away packs containing these drugs.


    Freedom of Information Request

    A recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveals the National Clinical Advisor and Group Lead at the HSE was issuing entirely conflicting instructions to hospital CEO’s around the country in respect of Hydroxychloroquine. A letter to the CEO’s of Irish Hospitals ,dated 24/March/2020 instructs that:

    Hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) has been identified as having antiviral activity against SARS-CoV2.There is sufficient rationale and pre-clinical evidence of effectiveness to include it as an antiviral treatment option and is included in the guideline.

    Its use was not, however permitted in the community or the Nursing Homes. Even more bizarrely in another letter of the same date, issued by Primary Care Reimbursement and Eligibility at the HSE instructed that all pharmacists in Ireland to report any doctor writing prescriptions for this medication.

    NPHET and/or the HSE had decided that patients would not be treated in the community despite us having effective medication (chloroquine has been known since 2002/3 to have antiviral properties) and despite it being prescribed, albeit empirically, by family physician (See: ‘Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread’ Virology Journal, 2005).

    Physicians working within the community – GP’s who cared sufficiently to question the guidelines – looked into using Hydroxychloroquine and found the available evidence instructing that Hydroxychloroquine was most effective if used early in treatment. This is a common theme with most antibiotic or antiviral medications. So, it ought to have been abundantly clear that hospital was not the place where the treatment was needed, nor the setting where the treatment might even work. Of the c. 2000 Covid deaths that occurred in the Irish Nursing Home Sector it is doubtful if any one of them had access to this ‘effective antiviral treatment,’ which might well have saved their lives.

    A ‘visiting window’ at a nursing home in Wetherby, West Yorkshire.

    Loss of Hope

    It’s shocking to consider that while politicians, journalists and medics were ridiculing the U.S. President for using Hydroxychloroquine – at a time when Irish GP’s were being disciplined and placed under investigation for trying to use it to treat the sick and the dying – the doctors in charge of policy knew perfectly well that it was a safe and effective treatment.

    Even if decisive evidence was lacking, their application might at least have given people hope, which could plausibly have had a placebo effect. It seems as if ‘hope’ is precisely what they wanted to remove. The absence of hope certainly contributed to many lonely deaths.

    This seems to have been designed to serve a Pharmaceutical Agenda. You see Covid genetic vaccines were licensed for use under ‘Emergency Use Authorisation’ (EUA). They could only escape the necessity of appropriate trials and be released onto the market on condition that there were no available treatments. So, effective medications were withheld and carnage ensued in the nursing home sector, where victims were deprived of an opportunity to say goodbye to loved ones weeping in car parks. Their deaths facilitated a Pharmaceutical Agenda. They apparently died ‘for the greater good’.

    This theme of no treatment, in spite of thousands of case studies from around the world, was perpetuated in a February 2021 HIQA report. It was an approach demonstrating either willful blindness or callous disregard for the need to ‘first do no harm.’

    In hindsight, and having climbed in and out of so many rabbit holes, it’s hard not to believe that most people just follow orders – they don’t think, they don’t read, they just pay the mortgage, feed the children, get through the day and find comfort in wearing blinkers. And who could blame them?

    The reality is probably more than most could bear. Manchurian Monkeys are everywhere and they need to be controlled. One can’t have liberal democracy upsetting the plans for a greater, if less populated, future. Thus, insidiously unelected and unaccountable bodies – such as the EU Commission, UN, IMF, WHO and WEF slowly dismantle any democratic processes that might thwart their path to political hegemony: suppressing free speech, the right of travel, right of assembly, bodily autonomy, online anonymity, cash transactions and soon perhaps all forms of political dissent.

    Feature Image: Building of the Unit 731 bioweapon facility in Harbin

  • The Birth of a Doctor

    The title of this article may seem somewhat prosaic, but given that it really is about birth after death it seems appropriate. For I really did die on July 25 2022, and that which came back to life was not the same person, and certainly not the same doctor.

    Prior to 2020 I hadn’t asked the question: ‘what is a doctor?’ I entered medical school to escape working class powerlessness, and successfully developed unhealthy delusions of grandeur reveling in a body of knowledge that I now know to be about as substantial as clouds. I did have some moments of sober reflection during my undergraduate days, but they were not in Dublin. Rather, the people and doctors of Moscow taught me to see the world from a different perspective. I have no love of Soviet-style Communism, and no wish to eulogize it, given the millions of lives lost or destroyed, but the sense of classlessness I experienced in the Russia of 1990 was liberating. It was a feeling that soon evaporated on returning to the ‘land of the free.’

    Reflecting now on how I practiced medicine, I think that it was fortunate that for much of that time I worked in low-risk environments. This was fortunate for the patients who encountered me at that time. Despite my paucity of knowledge and practical skills I succeeded in doing some good by listening and tried to understand complex human relationships, and the societal forces shaping these. With that perceived limited skill set – perhaps created by impostor syndrome and the pressure of the short duration of time per consultation – one invariably becomes a conduit for the distribution of pharmaceutical products. The quick pattern recognition followed by the reflexive use of the prescription pad. I was getting well paid. I was doing the same as my colleagues, or at least that’s what we told each other in practice meetings, and all was right in the world.

    Of course, I never really questioned what world I was actually referring to, my own or my patients. On reflection I chose willful blindness over open scepticism, a strange position to take for a young man brought up in Ireland since the 1960s. This was a country that showed clearly – at least to anyone who chose to look – that those in power and positions of authority had feet of clay. That period revealed clerical abuse, government corruption and waste, medical malfeasance in the form of vaccine experiments and the selling of children to wealthy Americans in collusion with the Church. Then we had the banking and economic collapse leading to the selling off of the country and its sovereignty, and more recently the Covid-19 scandal. Why did I think that the biomedical model served anyone other than those corporations and professions earning vast profits from illness?

    Image Daniele Idini.

    Awakening

    A growing cynicism and scepticism coalesced into an awakening on St Patrick’s day March 17, 2020 when then Taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar paraphrased Winston’s Churchill’s World War II speech: ‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ It was then, to quote Emily Dickenson, that I felt “a cleaving in my mind”. The juxtaposition of such incongruent images as the much loved and revered patron saint of Ireland with his herpetology skills, and the current barely re-elected and much reviled Taoiseach conjuring up images of the London Blitz when speaking about an impending wave of beta-corona virus infections recalled a Monty Python sketch.

    The more I listened to mainstream media in Ireland that mainly consisted of the state-funded Raidio Teilifis Éireann (RTÉ), the more the absurdities flowed and the cleft grew. Eventually, this dislocated myself and a few like-minded colleagues from the rest of our colleague’s apparent embrace of what to us seemed a clearly fabricated, dystopian reality. Doctors shut their practices, refused to see or treat patients because the Irish College of General Practitioners told them that there was no treatment available. Yet, the HSE had been claiming that hydroxychloroquine was effective in treating Sars-CoV1, from 2003, sending a circular to pharmacists suggesting they stock up on the drug and reserved it for treating patients in hospital with Sars-CoV2.

    Who thought that this was ethically and morally appropriate? The rest of society followed suit accepting with slack-jawed-gormlessness curious phrases such as ‘apart together’,’social distancing’,’flatten the curve,’ along with the ultra-dystopian ‘build back better’ and the ‘new normal’. What did any of these inane statements even mean?

    Societal strategies such as mandatory mask-wearing were inflicted with the emphatic certainty only fools can generate and even bigger fools gorge themselves on. Masks of any material, worn walking through restaurants, but not seated, even masks for solo journeys in cars. Then we had the perspex screens over which, apparently, viruses couldn’t jump, the safe purchasing practice of beer and crisps, but not socks and shoes, within the same department stores, and the viral-repellent Nine Euro Meal, along with the destructive removal of children from school for months.

    The sacred was not spared the ravages of this banal evil. Burials were in closed caskets, while no wakes were allowed, and only a ‘safe’ few mourners were permitted; weddings were cancelled, and masses went uncelebrated.

    The medical profession adopted its own dystopian practices such as artificially ventilating cases initially, at least until they realised they were actively killing people. Within general practice the main concern expressed on a well known GP support website was the potential loss of income if we couldn’t see patients. Any attempt to discuss the ramifications of drastically altering the daily rhythms of society was met with ridicule, and dismissed as irrelevant. After all, this was a pandemic and we could lose a substantial amount of our income! Later, when the topic of vaccine adverse events were raised, many of the same people urged us to shut up and vaccinate.

    Nursing Homes

    Meanwhile, in the nursing homes around Ireland, the elderly were left alone, unloved, unvisited and untreated unless it was end of life care. How ironic and criminally sad that these people should be treated this way for ‘their own good’.

    A personal story about a patient of mine may bring home the human tragedy. Jim and Mary were married for close to sixty years. Mary was moved to a nursing home after her dementia worsened to a point where she could no longer be cared for at home. Once that happened Jim visited her every day. Speaking to him after several of these visits he expressed his frustration at her memory loss. Then one day after a visit he came out and told me that he discovered that Mary had excellent recall of the events of their early life together, so he would just talk about those memories. For a while he had the woman he married back.

    Then the nursing homes prevented people visiting on account of Covid. Neither the residents nor their families were asked for their permission to be separated. Jim still visited everyday but he would come away frustrated. Mary would be placed in the window, like a mannequin, and Jim would stand outside. On a sunny day he would stand there looking at his own reflection, unable to see his wife.

    Jim was finally allowed in to see Mary, but by then she was on her death bed and was unable to share any memories or even say goodbye. This was for the greater good of course.

    What wasn’t used for anyone’s ‘ good’ were treatments such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine despite emerging evidence of efficacy from around the world from reputable clinicians. Curiously these ‘reputable’ clinicians rapidly became disreputable, despite decades of blemish-free clinical service to their patients. Some had very respectable research and academic careers. Yet, they became outcasts, renegades, not to be trusted according to the ‘fact-checkers.’ This latter group of reprobates turned out to be captured academics with vested interests in protecting certain ideologies or social media companies, pressurised by the U.S. state department and FBI to suppress all ‘thought crime’.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    But One Hope

    Fear was thus weaponised as the great and the good climbed aboard the gravy train and stoked fear until a mental paralysis gripped the nation. Any dissenting voice was dismissed as selfish and lacking a social conscience. We had but one hope: the vaccine, which was arriving at ‘warp speed,’ while Ursula von der Leyden was exhausting her texting thumb making sure that we in Europe would be saved.

    Everybody would be rescued, whether they wanted it or not, and sure who wouldn’t want a novel pharmaceutical product that was still in phase 3 of clinical trials. Trials that were confounded by giving the placebo arm the product, a product never before used successfully as a vaccine. This was a product for whom the English language had to be subverted in order to accommodate it. Only the insane or the selfish would not want to be rescued, and we don’t want those type of people in our ‘new normal’ world was the message that came from politicians, celebrities and doctors via a complicit media. They pleaded for all our sake to get vaccinated. These were people who at any other time would not give a moments reflection to inordinately long waiting times in our public hospitals, the overcrowding in our prisons, the record levels of homeless children, or the plight of the working class suddenly wanted to embrace collectivism, and ideas about humanity sharing the burden of this ‘pandemic.’ And it worked. Beaten down by fearmongering propaganda and the mind-numbing effects of Netflix, beer and pizza most people walked towards the light, or rather what they were told was the light.

    As of 2025 homelessness in Ireland is at a record high, along with immigration and the cost of living. Excess deaths, which remained steady until 2020 (2018: 31,116; 2019: 31,134; 2020: 31,765) rising to 33,055 in 2021, 35,477 in 2022, 35,459 in 2023 and 35,173 in 2024. Cancer is also on the rise. We have the second highest rate in Europe as of 2022 (our Minister for Health’s office informed me that this was because we are so much better at recording than other nations). International events have further revealed the powerless of many nations and that the rule of law isn’t universal. There is no rules based order. There is only power and money and the golden rule is that those who have the gold rule!

    Image: Polina Tankilevitch.

    Vaccine Injured

    Amongst the flotsam and jetsam post-Covid are the inadequately accounted injured by these vaccines. They are deemed to be invisible, however, even inconvenient and regularly have their realities denied by the very people who created the problem. The medical profession is still clinging to the idea that they saved the world from the plague and are indignant that more gratitude hasn’t been shown.

    The medical profession according to JAMA(Journal of the American Medical Association) has seen a 30% drop in public trust. This will have complex reasons behind it, but the combination of snout in trough and downright dishonesty will have contributed. Gaslighting those who were previously well and now cannot function after receiving Covid vaccines has only added to this.

    People will reflect on the misuse of the Covid vaccines, the profits made and the lies told about its efficacy and safety, and wonder how many times these same scenarios played out in a greater or lesser form in the past.

    After thirty years of practice, I simply can no longer engage with a profession that has been captured by an industry whose sole aim is profit. Most postgraduate medical training is paid for or delivered by the pharmaceutical industry. One has to question what are the priorities of an industry that spends $19 dollars on advertising and marketing for every dollar spent on research.

    This results is a disease model rather than one that examines the root cause. The former results in conditions that coincidentally have pharmaceutical products as alleged solutions. This chronic disease approach rarely if ever returns a person to a state of health. With such an interventionist approach one can understand why around a quarter of a million people may die each year at the hands of the medical profession in the USA, and perhaps 5,000 per annum in Ireland. An emphasis on sleep, diet, breath and movement is unlikely to result in such carnage or in such vast profits.

    The shifting of a paradigm is rarely easy to achieve, but it is doubly troublesome when the concepts are unfamiliar to the people one is seeing on a daily basis in practice. Not only have the medical profession been trained to view health through the lens of chronic disease but the population at large connect health this with pharmaceutical products. They receive this message from most hucksters who want you to buy their products/procedures/cleanses etc. So when it comes to the person taking control of their lives there is a gargantuan effort needed to shift many people’s locus of control from the external to the internal. And it can be financially risky to give a person agency over their own health.

    Image: Brett Sayles.

    Growing Awareness

    Fortunately, there is a growing awareness that lifestyle is more than a sidebar to achieving health. Instead it is health. One aspect in particular has gained a wide interest recently, the issue of insulin resistance.

    This is this concept that I now spend most of my consultations discussing with amenable patients. The subject can be as complex or as straight-forward as one wants to make it. Fundamentally, we do not need carbohydrates, another large industry – the misnamed ‘food industry’ – would disagree, but physiology says we don’t.

    Up to 70% of the Western diet is composed of carbohydrates. Most of the items in our supermarket trollies are in packets with barcodes and usually contain a lot of carbohydrate, and worse still refined carbohydrates. These products are broken down into the main fuel of the body and in particular the brain, i.e. glucose. However many of these products contain fructose, or more precisely high fructose corn syrup, a substance that causes a great deal of problems for our mitochondria and subsequently our cells and energy levels. Most of the health problems that we develop are ‘energy’ problems. Using this term runs the risk of wandering into the land of ‘woo,’ but slowly the concept of energy deficits as a cause of many inflammatory conditions, such as diabetes, cancers and dementia is gaining traction.

    Returning to insulin resistance. This is a phenomenon that occurs when we consume and create more glucose. Then our body habitus changes, i.e. we get more fat than muscle and we move less. We then need more insulin to regulate our glucose levels. And this is where current medical thinking creates the problem that it then goes on to profit from.

    We measure glucose not insulin. Glucose stays within the normal range for decades before it rises above some arbitrary threshold to be called Type 2 diabetes mellitus. But insulin has been raised for decades resulting in high blood pressure, altered lipids, migraines, anxiety, depression, IBS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, dementia, cancer and insomnia to list but a few. All of these conditions are seen as separate problems when in fact they have a common treatable root cause.

    Let me just clarify something at this stage. I am not saying that these complex conditions are solely caused by insulin resistance (IR), but IR is a fundamental feature and if more effort went into reducing IR through actual lifestyle changes then people could actually return to and maintain a state of good health.

    Image: Josh Sorenson.

    Suicide

    At the beginning of this article I alluded to how I died in 2022 and that was the death of this doctor. From that suicide attempt, an attempt precipitated by increasing dismay at the state of the world and my profession in particular, I have rejected many of the beliefs and gods of the past. I have found hope in taking an approach to both my lifestyle and that of my patients which actually has tangible results, and is not based on probabalistic forecasts. My own state of health is fundamental to how I practice medicine and is reflected in my consultation style and physical presence with my patients, and whether they ‘believe’ what I tell them until they see that it is or isn’t working for themselves. Then we rethink and try again. This is unlike the medical model that expects the patient to believe regardless of the almost inevitable side effects.

    The physician needs to be and live in the state of health that they want the patient to obtain. Patients are driven by emotion and to some extent by optics not by rational argument. An overweight, flatulent and out-of-breath doctor is not going to promote anything healthy in his or her patients. They can, however, empathize with the pill for every ill model because they have clearly embraced that wholeheartedly.

    The role of the doctor has declined in significance over time and will continue to do so with the evolution of more advanced AI models if doctors continue down the same road using the same disease model paradigms that are conveniently linked to pharmaceutical products. Instead, doctors need to revert to the model of the physicians of old, and perhaps once again let ‘food be thy medicine’ and be role models for their patients. Optics in today’s age of forever-on-screens is a useful adjunct, but the doctor-patient relationship untainted by influence from the pharmaceutical industry should still be the bedrock of the practice of medicine.

    Feature Image: Pixabay

  • Covid-19: ‘The North Began’ Part II

    Northern Ireland has already conducted a statutory inquiry into how Covid was managed. In contrast, the Republic is set to have a ‘review’ without statutory powers to compel witnesses to attend. This despite the Republic having had both a relatively high fatality rate and punitive restrictions that don’t appear to have worked. Maybe there is something to be learned from the Orangemen?

    In a seminal 1913 article entitled ‘The North Began’, the renowned scholar Eoin MacNeill opined that the rest of the island of Ireland could learn from the approach then adopted by Ulster Unionists in setting up the Ulster Volunteer Force. Ultimately, this led to the creation of the Irish Volunteers, ostensibly to protect Home Rule, then supposedly imminent, but which also contributed to the emergence of the Irish Republican Army after the Easter Rising of 1916.

    MacNeill’s argument comes to mind with the recent announcement of a limited ‘Review’ into how Covid-19 was managed in the Southern Irish state – and also regarding how the experience of life during Covid differed from the North, especially for Dubliners, who were significantly disadvantaged.

    Who can forget – amid frenzied reports of hospitals being overrun in Italy and China by a new infection – this state going into lockdown as a ‘temporary’ precaution? A mantra quickly adopted was to ‘flatten the curve’ referring to the Rate of Infection, with every citizen encouraged to adhere to ‘social distancing’ rules until the health system was ready to absorb the expected surge.

    Having cut ICU beds after the Crash, the twenty-six county state was poorly placed by comparison with most of its E.U. counterparts to deal with expected surges.

    The Irish ‘Plan’

    Yet, for once, the Irish state did have a properly planned response (‘Ireland’s National Action Plan in response to COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Update 16th March 2020’) – having previously modelled responses to pandemic scenarios. Essentially, it was envisaged that third level institutes would be closed – as occurred – with field hospitals opened in these large, idle facilities. It was, on paper at least, a great plan.

    With any ‘Irish Plan’, there were two distinct pathways to follow. The first involved attempting to follow the ‘Zero Covid’ approach adopted by New Zealand, which sought to keep Covid off their islands altogether by requiring international passengers to remains for a specified period in quarantine facilities prior to any stay in the country. Then there was the so-called ‘Swedish Model’, which emphasized protection of the vulnerable, while minimising restrictions on personal liberties.

    Neither of those models were pursued in Ireland. Instead, we developed a strange hybrid with an emphasis on ‘a top-down, command-and-control approach.’

    Once an estimated 10,000 Irish racegoers took a round trip to the UK to witness J.P. McManus’s horse run in the Cheltenham Races whatever slim chance the ‘Zero’ option had of success evaporated. Incidentally, this large migration occurred with the approval of the Chief Medical Officer, Tony Holohan, who also ordered care homes to re-open in March, 2020.

    Instructively the Irish plan was based on an assumption that ‘6% of people may become more seriously infected and will require hospital care.’

    It is now clear that this figure was much exaggerated, based on flawed Chinese data, and generated undue fear. Moreover, early statistics on Covid hospital admissions seem to have included patients who tested positive for the virus, but were admitted for something else, as well as those who caught the virus while in hospital being treated for another condition.

    Many of those hospitalised ‘with Covid’ may have been asymptomatic, due to the sensitivity of the PCR test. As an important article in the New York Times from August 2020 put it: ‘Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be.’

    Sweden

    In these circumstances, the Swedish Model was harshly criticized as uncaring, and it was said that the disease would spread like wildfire. Yet, in hindsight, it seems to have been the lesser of evils.

    Alas, there is still no consensus as to the cumulative total of fatalities that occurred in the different European states. Nonetheless, even sources that seem less favourable to the Swedish approach, such as the ‘Worldometer’ table on Wikipedia, rate their death toll as lower than Ireland’s per capita, despite a significantly older population. There were 1,860 Reported Deaths per million happening there, as opposed to the 1,980 here. (Original source: https://www.worldometers.info/ coronavirus/?utm_campaign= homeAdvegas1. See Wikipedia table, ‘Statistics by country and territory’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ COVID-19_pandemic_in_Europe).

    Another metric provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, ranks the Scandinavian nation lowest for overall cumulative excess deaths among a number of countries studied from 2020-22, at 6.8 per cent. By comparison Australia had 18 per cent, the U.K. 24.5 per cent, and the U.S.A. a rate of 54.1 per cent.

    In retrospect, it is plausible that the ‘Irish Plan’ might have co-existed with either the Zero or Swedish approaches. Based on what was known at the time, it may have been worth trying a Zero approach initially. It probably would not have worked – not just because of a porous border with the North or membership of the European Union – but also because it seems that Covid-19 was already circulating in Europe as early as March, 2019.

    Normalisation of House-Arrest

    Intelligent leadership adapts to changing circumstance, and so, with the likely failure of the Zero-Covid approach, the Swedish model could – and should – have been adopted by the autumn of 2020. Had the Irish authorities adhered to their own plan, by that time, the universities would have been functioning as field hospitals. Yet that’s not what happened.

    Instead, ‘temporary’ lockdowns, introduced in March 2020, were gradually normalised into a weird form of house arrest. Rather than lasting a few weeks, these ‘temporary’ measures would dominate our lives for almost two years. It was an unprecedented, draconian suppression of civil liberties, which became more tyrannical and absurd as time passed by.

    The ‘new normal’ was to live within two kilometres of home, later extended to some five kilometres. All social activities were banned, bar a clap in one’s garden to thank ‘front-line’ staff. Meanwhile, Irish care homes – where air is often stuffy and poor quality – were left to fester with full occupancy, as sick elderly patients were released from hospitals. Consequently, the level of mortality that occurred in these institutions was second only to that of Canada during the first wave.

    That the Taoiseach at the time of outbreak, Leo Varadkar, had previously been a medical doctor, was an initial source of hope that we would be guided by competent leadership.

    Empty hospitals, however, such as Baggot Street and St. Bricin’s in Dublin, continued to lie idle. Elected representatives, including Varadkar, effectively devolved leadership to NPHET (the National Public Health Emergency Team for Covid-19). which was composed almost entirely of career civil servants – arguably with little ‘skin in the game’ if businesses were shut down – but whose pronouncements came to be treated with the same reverence as was once accorded to the Catholic hierarchy. Throughout that period their evaluations decided our destinies in ways that often seemed ridiculous.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    Science becomes religion

    Holohan’s decision to appoint Professor Philip Nolan – ‘The pair had known each other for years’ – to oversee disease modelling ought to have prompted concern. Nolan was then President of Maynooth University, his ‘research was in physiology – specifically the control of breathing and the cardiovascular system during sleep.’

    With limited apparent research background or expertise in infectious diseases, Nolan’s wayward models – and bizarre commentary on antigen testing – informed Irish government decisions throughout the pandemic.

    According to the authors of Pandemonium: Power, Politics and Ireland’s Pandemic (2022), ‘almost everyone who attended NPHET meetings agreed on one thing above all others: this was a Tony Holohan production.’ An unnamed source in that publication described his style as ‘very dictatorial and autocratic,’ and ‘intolerant of alternative views.’

    Science became the new religion. Yet the measures often seemed scientifically questionable. Thus, in line with WHO guidance a positive PCR test within twenty-eight days of someone dying was listed as a Covid fatality – even if that poor individual had died in a car crash!

    Meanwhile, ‘stay safe’ became ‘stay sane’ for many of us who watched scarce resources dwindle, as the normal conduct of business was prevented. Sadly, little adaption to challenging circumstance occurred in line with ‘the science’.

    Who can forget the moral panic that ensued in the summer of 2020? Thus, tabloid photographers cunningly used long range lenses to foreshorten the view of people at beaches. Despite people sitting apart, it looked as if they were on top of one another. Subsequently, in January 2021 it emerged that not one case of transmission could be traced to the beach ‘outrages’ when assessed by the U.K. authorities.

    ‘The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty’?

    The Irish state was set-up a century ago to prevent the coercion of Irish citizens. Notably, the fourth paragraph of the 1916 Proclamation asserts:

    The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.

    Ergo the social contract on which this Republic is based ought to protect personal freedoms, within bounds. Yet, instead we had unprecedented and clearly disproportionate restrictions imposed on us by our own government. It seems that being ‘the best in the class’ mattered most of all to Irish politicians in terms of accepting dictates from European masters.

    EU leadership?

    Meanwhile, disastrously, leadership at the European level was sorely lacking: Rather than providing positive guidance to adapt to the reality that Covid was effectively endemic by the winter of 2020, the European Union supported lockdowns, a milder model of that first trialled in that great bastion of liberal democracy: the People’s Republic of China.

    Hence the Germans banned outdoor markets – even though outdoor trade should have been encouraged. Meanwhile, only at the last minute did the Austrian government abandon the idea of forcing injections on recalcitrant civilians. Thus, it seems logical that there should be a proper inquiry into how Covid was handled at the E.U. level, as well as in each member state.

    The unwillingness of the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen to release communications with vaccine manufacturers, including text messages with Pfizer boss Albert Bourla, also raises serious questions regarding transparency.

    In Ireland, the utter incompetence of Boris Johnson in the U.K. provided lasting cover. He was memorably, if somewhat bizarrely, compared to a rogue shopping trolley creating chaos about the place.

    A regular refrain on Irish media, and in private conversations, was that ‘at least we’re not as bad as the Brits’. Thus, instead of finding ways to enable the maximum amount of people to live their lives as normally as possible, officialdom largely adopted a ‘no can do’ approach. At times, it almost seemed as if the state broadcaster was intent on terrorising the population into submission.

    Irish Constitution

    In such a challenging period, thoughts of God might may have come to mind. In line with the sentiments expressed in the 1916 Proclamation, Article 44 of the Irish Constitution of 1937 protects practice of faith from obstruction.

    Unlike care homes, churches and temples are typically tall spacious venues with plenty of fresh air. There was little scientific basis for banning people from attending such places, provided certain measures were adopted – including ensuring adequate ventilation, personal space, and adapting rituals pertaining to communion and hand shaking.

    In my view, the state was obliged to vindicate these rights. After all, what is the point of a constitutional right if serious efforts are not made to adhere to it in challenging circumstances?

    Instead, essential freedoms were extinguished at the stroke of a pen. Thus, by early 2021, twelve months into the pandemic, what were effectively inmates of the twenty-six counties were being subjected to the most stringent restrictions on personal freedoms in Europe.

    Lockdown gains?

    It may be recalled that during Covid, there was talk about ‘building back better’; that society would become more compassionate; that we would have a notably better health system afterwards Today, little of that seems evident.

    Indeed, under questioning in September 2020 from Michael McNamara TD in the Dáil, Taoiseach Micheál Martin revealed that just twenty-three ICU beds had been added since the start of the pandemic.

    The impact of shutting down the construction trade for long periods should also not be overlooked. Homeless figures are now at an all-time high – amid huge levels of emigration, much of this in response to the state’s desultory attitude towards housing. All of this despite Ireland being the least densely populated state in the E.U., and supposedly among the richest.

    Nonetheless, in both Cork city and Dún Laoghaire, earnest efforts were made during Covid to adapt and advance neighbourhoods by way of enhancing their public domains – thus facilitating local trade and improving amenities.

    What then was the experience of Dublin City? As the main place of work for the country’s civil servants, the city centre was all the more quiet for their absence. While the country was undergoing the most severe of lockdowns in Europe, Dubliners were, to all intents and purposes, singled out for the most repressive regime of all.

    Along with ‘front-line workers’, anyone involved in agriculture or food production during Covid was effectively exempt from restrictions on movement. Hence, it was the urban populations who were particularly hampered in the course of their normal lives – while many of their rural counterparts experienced much less difference, apart, obviously, from children being kept at home from school.

    Despite it being well-established by 2021 that it was safe for people to socialise outside, March that year saw ordinary decent Dubliners being harassed by police for drinking outside in parks by the River Dodder – instead of gathering inside, where infection would more likely occur.

    A few stretches of cycleways were added along Werburgh and Nassau Streets – with unsightly plastic bollards inserted there and elsewhere. Public toilets were provided in an ugly kiosk outside the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre – despite purpose-built public toilets being sited only sixty metres away inside Stephen’s Green, that the Office of Public Works keeps locked-up.

    The only serious civic gain during that time was the pedestrianisation of Capel Street, and a small amount of pedestrian pavement being widened elsewhere.

    Decline of Dublin

    Otherwise, Dublin’s city centre clearly stagnated. A small vignette: throughout the entirety of Dublin 1, there is only one public glass recycling bank sited at Shamrock Street in Ballybough. That is obviously disastrous in terms of under-provision for such a densely populated area.

    Coincidentally, every year, the Irish Times reports on the IBAL Litter Survey which repeatedly finds Dublin’s north inner city to be the worst in the state. Yet, during the ‘Covid Years’, City Council management actually moved to close down this one glass recycling facility! Fortunately it was saved in September 2022 – but only after intervention by councillors, (Alas, no reports in the Irish Times about any of that.)

    Meanwhile, cops on the beat became far less visible around the inner city. There were regular reports of gang fights occurring around the quays as a thuggish culture festered, culminating in the notorious Dublin Riots of October 2023.

    A lasting perception of inadequate personal safety has eroded public confidence, which has resulted in people avoiding town – further undermining the commercial viability of many of the businesses based therein.

    Thus, the city centre is clearly now in crisis; once bedrock establishments of the city’s premier core around Stephen’s Green, such as Shanahan’s on the Green and Café en Seine, have either closed down or have seen profits halved.

    The commissioning of a report last year by the government regarding O’Connell Street – while doing little else obvious otherwise – does not inspire confidence.

    The prospect of an accountable elected City Mayor with powers has long been held out by central government as a logical solution for the city’s management. Yet just like the airport railway that has been repeatedly promised since the early 1970s, I’ll believe it when I see it.

    Failure to adapt

    Ultimately, the initial response by responsible citizens to adhere to extraordinary state rules in a time of crisis was abused beyond belief. On this, the neoliberal economist Milton Friedman was proven right: nothing becomes so permanent as a ‘temporary’ government programme.

    Any hopes of the state responding to Covid in a progressive manner gradually evaporated. Official guidance regarding mandatory facemasks was never properly updated – despite clear evidence that the effectiveness of basic blue ‘surgical’ masks was minimal, at best. Had people been made aware of the efficacy of different mask types – albeit a secondary consideration to good ventilation – it would have enabled citizens to better manage their risk exposure.

    Meanwhile, the arrival of low-cost, antigen Covid tests for home use offered an obvious way forward. People would have a quick way of identifying whether they would pass on the virus – and could act accordingly. Remarkably, however, NPHET’s Philip Nolan pronounced on Twitter that these were being offered by ‘snake-oil salesmen’!

    Fortunately, outside eyes were watching. Harvard epidemiologist, Professor Michael Mina, brought some sense to proceedings by tweeting back at Nolan ‘For an advisor to your government – you don’t appear to know what you are talking about’, adding, ‘The comment adds nothing of benefit and further sows confusion. You should be ashamed of your demeanour here.’

    Regime Media

    So much media space was bought by the state by way of advertisements, it was Herculean. Unsurprisingly, counter-arguments were not encouraged, as few outlets were prepared to question the official line.

    In hindsight, it is remarkable to consider the emphasis placed on encouraging individuals to take – and indeed coercing them into taking through passports – vaccines. The miraculous benefits of Pfizer, Moderna, and Astra-Zenica were all widely publicized at the time. Yet, the vaccine trials were not actually set up to prove they would either prevent transmission or serious illness.

    When Astra Zenica was taken off the market entirely early last year, arising from ‘rare but serious’ side-effects, media coverage was muted. Meanwhile, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine has also been withdrawn from the market in the United States – but yet again, there seems to have been little reportage here on the magic shot being discontinued.

    So, where were the brave journalists questioning what was happening at the time, or now for that matter? Aside from photos of naughty social occasions that leaked onto the internet, commercial media organs essentially competed with one other to be the first to publicize official edicts. There is little reason to suspect any difference in future. Other than a few honourable exceptions, it seems what we have in this country is a propaganda apparatus, as opposed to a free media.

    The pronouncements of NPHET were all that mattered. Nine euros was sanctioned as the minimal spend when eating out – presumably because Covid was waiting for an eight euro offer?

    All the time, people delayed necessary health checks and procedures – initially ‘to flatten the curve’ – and so critical conditions may have gone untreated. Others put on weight through inactivity.

    There was also the undoubted impact on many people’s mental health, as after a few months, the grim reality of forced isolation, without-end-in-sight, pushed many towards the edge. At least in part, such factors may explain Ireland’s highly elevated mortality in the wake of Covid. All this underlines the need for a robust inquiry into the state’s management of that period.

    Any Accountability?

    It seems to me that the cumulative effects of Ireland’s Covid response surely did more harm than good. Now, if this state is to do its job properly in future – if we are to learn anything from that dystopian time – it is essential to conduct a transparent and rigorous assessment of the response.

    The effects of that period were pronounced and are, to some extent, ongoing. For example, it is notable that the number of recipients of sick benefit in England and Wales has increased by 38% since Covid. How does that tally with the experience here? Lacking powers to compel witnesses and documents, how can the state’s Covid ‘Review’ properly assess impacts of its response during that time?

    I fear nothing will be learned from this Review, as it lacks the necessary powers. Yet where are the elected representatives who should be demanding the proper statutory inquiry that is necessary?

    Without such a process, if we ever encounter a similar challenge, it is worrying that the state’s agents – ‘the permanent government’ of civil servants – may fail to have due regard to fundamental constitutional rights.

    Game On (for some)

    Memorably, with restrictions on sports, almost all facilities were shut down – despite most activities being held outdoor. Notably, golf and hill-walking were prohibited – even though these presented the least threat of exposure to an airborne virus.

    As time went on, some allowances were made for certain sporting bodies – such as the GAA. Again, Dublin benefited least, as that body’s membership is disproportionately rural.

    By year two, the emergence of a two-tier state seemed fairly clear, with the GAA allowed to have over 40,000 spectators from Mayo and Tyrone attend the All-Ireland Football final in Croke Park on September 11, 2021 – at a time when many businesses in that part of Dublin were closed down.

    The decision-making process that allowed the match to take place was notable, as the ‘new’ freedoms were only announced retrospectively – with a press statement issued on September 9th stating: ‘From 6 September, indoor events can take place with 60% of the venue’s maximum capacity, provided all the people attending are fully vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19 in the past 6 months’. Did the GAA know something that the rest of us didn’t when arranging the fixture?

    Party On

    Only later did it emerge that as early as June 2020, the Department of Foreign Affairs on Stephen’s Green were hosting soirées in spite of the rules – well before Boris’s notorious Christmas Downing Street parties later that same year.

    Meanwhile, a retirement gathering in RTE featuring some of the best known presenters on the station, was found to have involved five breaches in relation to Covid 19 advice, protocols and regulations.

    Memorably, an apparent sense of entitlement also extended to then E.U. Commissioner Phil Hogan, who was forced to resign in August 2020 after being caught breaking the rules by playing golf and having supper afterwards. And with that, went the best opportunity Ireland had to influence E.U. affairs at its most senior level.

    Even a year later, little seemed to have been learned, when it emerged that the former Minister for Children, Katherine Zappone, had held a party on July 21 for around fifty attendees in the garden of the Merrion Hotel. But that was all happily resolved when the Government Press Office released a statement a fortnight later stating that the Attorney General was of the view that it was permissible for outdoor gatherings of up to 200 people.

    How can such carry-on occur in a proper democracy? It seems that rules could be retrospectively interpreted differently if required.

    Justice for the Plebs

    Yet the leniency shown to ‘the few’ sharply contrasts with the dogged pursuit of ‘the many’. For the outrageous crime of spreading the Lord’s Word, in December 2022 three Evangelical Christian street preachers were prosecuted for holding an outdoor event beyond five kilometres of their homes the previous year. Consequently, those three men each now have criminal records – having never had them before.

    As of August 2023, it was reported that there had been a staggering 13,000 prosecutions under the Health Acts against Covid offenders – and yet even today, this madness has seemingly not stopped!

    Only this week, in February 2025, the trial date has been set in April for the prosecution of the so-called ‘Dubai Two’ who allegedly broke quarantine rules during that period. Thus. two young mothers face the prospect of a month in jail and a €2,000 fine.

    Where is the Republic that ‘guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens’ as per the 1916 Proclamation?

    Vaccine vs Liberty?

    Based on that experience, it is impossible to ever again trust the state to ‘suspend’ civil liberties. What reward was there for compliance?

    Let’s not forget that only the day before the 2021 GAA football final, it was reported that 90% of Irish adults were fully vaccinated. Yet, a mere four days later, Holohan was out again warning that further lockdowns were on the agenda – as indeed occurred, with restrictions only ending fully in February 2022.

    So then, if the vaccines were so effective, why then were we again subjected to lockdowns after much of the population had been vaccinated? Either the vaccines worked, and subsequent lockdowns should not have occurred – or else the vaccines were not so effective, and the emphasis put on mass inoculation was incorrect. This argument needs to be addressed.

    Even with the high rates of vaccination and diminished threat, as late as January 2022, members of NPHET were contemplating force injecting the small minority outstanding.

    All of this points to the need for public confidence to be restored – by way of a robust evaluation as to how matters were managed. It is now five years since Covid began, and three since it ended; people’s memories will be getting hazy.

    RTÉ: Rewarding Failure?

    And what of the media apparatus that helped ensure compliance in the population? The year after Covid ended, the wheels came off the wagon of RTÉ, when it emerged that there had been serious problems with the finances and management at the state-owned company.

    Memorably the then Director General Dee Forbes resigned in June, 2023. Around the same time, Ryan Tubridy’s ‘secret’ payments subsequently came to light.

    Problems in that organisation were evident for some time, as was previously raised in this publication, well before it exploded onto the national consciousness.

    Nonetheless, it appears that the Covid period provided cover for questionable practices, both within that organisation and in other state agencies.

    But this was small beer compared to the €725 million fixed upon the Exchequer only last year by the government to ensure RTÉ’s continued operation until 2028. That cash could be used to build up to 1,500 houses, potentially reducing the state’s homeless population by almost a third. Instead, it is being shovelled into an economic albatross that loyally served the government, when the people required rigorous journalism.

    How can we expect accountability at the state broadcaster when cash is shoveled in so easily?

    So then, whatever happened to the assertion in the 1916 Proclamation about ‘cherishing all of the children of the nation equally’?

    Looking North

    Thus, it is interesting to look North, as they took a somewhat different approach. It’s a different jurisdiction, but with a broadly similar social make-up.

    In the main, similar restrictions were adopted, with schools and pubs closed for much of the period. It was far from perfect in terms of coping with the crisis, with criticisms at the time, and since, as stated in evidence. Restrictions on social assemblies were clearly detested in some quarters, most memorably by a vocal Van Morrison.

    Yet, over time, a different approach gradually emerged. For example, in the first year, as occurred with crowd events in the south, the Orangemen called off their summer marches to prevent contagion. This was a sensible approach, given the knowledge at that time – and arguably more notable given that body has not always been associated with responsible approaches.

    But by the second summer, however, the Orangemen allowed outdoor, localised events to go on. Again, this was consistent with an evidence-based response. Simply put, the Orangemen got it right in terms of their Covid response!

    Last summer a suitably robust Inquiry was conducted in the North into how the state there had responded – with the BBC reporting that it had heard ‘devastating evidence with multiple failings across several departments.’ Hardly a ringing endorsement for that state’s response, which made for uncomfortable listening for many of those involved. Yet, the process may prove cathartic if mistakes are not to be repeated.

    As part of that inquiry, elected representatives were asked to turn over all text and WhatsApp messages from the period. Unfortunately, Sinn Féin politicians had apparently deleted the most relevant ones. In contrast, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) disclosed their texts. One member, Edwin Poots, appeared to have regarded Covid as a ‘Catholic’ disease – but, in fairness, he seems to have been an outlier.

    More encouraging were the texts from the current Joint First Minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, who voiced concern for children from poorer areas who were dependent on free school meals, which were to be suspended during school closures. This was a thoughtful and compassionate approach.

    Obvious need for a statutory Covid Inquiry in the ‘Republic’

    What could be learned from a comparable Covid inquiry in the South? Certainly, it would be very useful to gauge how the state implemented its emergency plan; how it adapted to new data; and how it will respond should a similar scenario ever again arise. MacNeill’s 1913 article resonates yet again; much can be learned from the approach adopted in Ulster.

    Instead, a culture of non-transparency that developed during Covid seems to have been normalised throughout the Southern government. Rather than a statutory Covid inquiry with accountability prioritised, it appears the so-called Republic are now to be governed according to secret pacts made with elected independent representatives.

    To borrow a description from Theobald Wolfe Tone, the last regime was ‘execrable’; and yet, there is every reason to fear the new administration may be even worse.

    Alas, it is hard to see how a non-statutory ‘review’ without powers to compel witnesses or documents will find much that is not already part of the establishment’s narrative.

    Without adequate explanations, as an inquiry could allow, my faith in this state has been shattered. Simply put, once entrusted with special powers, the government made a bad situation bloody awful.

    God forbid, if a proper inquiry was to occur, perhaps we might learn that at most crucial junctures, this state and at least some of its agents see themselves as beyond accountability – and are happy to force citizens to carry the cost of demented policies.

    Should this state ever again try to enforce measures such as those during Covid, I for one will be looking North to see how the Orange brethren respond. In the absence of accountable government here, I have learned to respect those who at least seem to prize their own civil liberties.

    Renowned musician Ronan O’Snodaigh (brother of Sinn Fein T.D. Aengus) playing bodhran on the walls of Derry/Londonderry with proud Orangeman Richard Campbell in 2021.

  • A Contract of Indefinite Duration

    The voice on the other end of the line was shaky and uncertain. ‘Are you alone?’ he asked. My wife had come upstairs with the phone just as I was getting out of the shower, ‘It’s your father,’ she said, eyebrows to the ceiling.

    My father and I have a good relationship now, a better one than when I was a teenager at least. My mind began to race as I sat on the edge of the bed, evaporating in my bathrobe, the bedroom door closed behind her with a polite click of the latch. ‘Yes I’m on my own Dad, is everything alright?’ I was half expecting a diagnosis of some kind: prostate, the big C, or something worse?

    ‘I couldn’t sleep last night son,’ his voice became a little more relaxed once privacy was assured. ‘I was up pacing the floor after watching that RTE documentary about abuse in the schools.’ As a rule, I don’t watch RTE – haven’t done so since the Covid years – so I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Child abuse has been grist to the media-mill since Angela’s Ashes. Indeed, I suspect people are becoming comfortably numb to the perennial revelations. Perhaps he was having a delayed reaction to the trauma of it all?

    ‘They mentioned Rosmini and the Carmelites,’ he continued,  ‘Jaysus it’s terrible son, terrible!’ he repeated, his voice wringing as though he was going to start crying. The penny finally dropped, and I realised where he was headed. ‘You and your brother went to those schools; Me and your mother sent yous there,’ he added soberly. ‘I couldn’t live with myself if I thought anything happened to either of yis. So I wanted to ask you,’ he spoke slowly, struggling to find words. I sighed, somewhat relieved there was no bad news or terminal diagnosis in the offing. Quietly smiling to myself, I tried to think of a clever answer that might reassure him.

    My Dad is a good man, he likes old things and the occasional pint. He worked hard all his life; a bus man, a taxi driver, a father to nine children. He doesn’t need to be unnecessarily upset in his twilight years. Had I been abused as a child I probably wouldn’t have told him. I suspect a lot of victims tell no one, and instead try to keep the hurt buried in a dark place, away from the growth inducing sunlight. I wondered how he was going to phrase the impending question?

    ‘Did you em, did you have any bother with that sort of thing when you were at boarding school?’ he spluttered, his tone rhetorical as though he expected me to answer in the affirmative. Perhaps he suspected that some of the harmless mischief I had been up to as a boy might have been some kind of ‘a cry for help’? I got into a lot of trouble at the Carmelite Boarding School in Moate. Mostly escaping into the town in the late evenings, to buy chips, drink cider, or try to meet up with my girlfriend Maggie. I restrained a chuckle, ‘what do you mean Dad?’ I pressed him. He sighed deeply, probably assuming I was being stupid and hadn’t got to the gist of the matter.

    ‘Ah for God’s sake son, I mean did any of them ever?’ His words crackled dryly, and then he blurted it out: ‘Did any of them ever interfere with you?’ The distasteful question hung in the air like a strand of hair pulled slowly out of a sandwich. There it is, I thought, that strange word: ‘interfere’, inextricably bound to the adolescence of Irish males for generations. Joyce’s A Portrait literally climaxes on the notion.

    In 1980s Ireland, most  boys were sinners, entirely guilty of ‘interfering’ with themselves. The risk of being interfered with by a person of authority, that particular ‘sin’ wasn’t on the horizon. Indeed, given the scale of abuse in Ireland unearthed in recent years, some people might wonder if child abuse was ever considered a ‘sin’ at all?

    The RTE programme that had upset my father did not arise out of any investigative journalism on the part of our national broadcaster; rather it was on foot of a ‘scoping inquiry’ that was initiated by the government in 2023, in response to a previous run of ‘new revelations’. This inquiry findings were published in September and contain 2295 allegations of sexual abuse across 300 schools between 1960-1990. In a somewhat nauseating twist, 590 of the allegations were recorded in 17 schools for children with disabilities and these allegations relate to 190 alleged abusers. Of the 884 alleged abusers across 42 religious orders, half are now believed to be deceased.

    To describe the report as grim reading would be an understatement. The Carmelites ran my boarding school in Moate, but I knew nothing about the Inquiry until my father’s phone call. Given the difficulties experienced by the few victims who come forward in these types of inquiries, I imagine the number of allegations (shocking as they are) are but the tip of the iceberg. Interestingly, a recent BBC news report on the Inquiry findings was quick to touch on the sacrilegious question of social complicity:

    Survivors also had a “strong belief that what was happening was so pervasive that it could not possibly have gone unnoticed by other staff, and the members and leadership of the religious orders”. People who had been abused told the report authors that: “the power of the Catholic Church permeated their lives in every way” and they believed there was no-one they could tell, including their parents.

    In Ireland since the early 1990s, religious abuse scandals have become a regular staple on the news. The official response follows the same prescription: establish an expensive tribunal headed up by a retired Judge; dispense a vulgar sort of financial compensation to the victims; and hopefully that’s the end of the matter, at least until the next batch of revelations. It’s an entirely post-colonial response, closely imitating the manner in which his lordship might on occasion have compensated a peasant farmer for the rape of his daughter.

    In reality, there is little if any appetite for understanding the conditions that made systemic child abuse possible. One might reasonably argue that there is little appetite to change a culture of abuse that dates back several hundred years. In Ireland, institutions get away with abuse. In a way, it is almost expected of them. The abuse (or at least the acceptance of it) is in our very nature; with time, all that appears to change is the form that the abuse takes.

    Consider that most elderly people have a medical cabinet overflowing with prescribed medications. More often than not this is an abuse of the elderly perpetrated by the medical establishment in Ireland. The technical term for the abuse is: ‘polypharmacy’. Despite this being common knowledge, is not yet a ‘scandal’ because of the blind faith that is afforded to the medical establishment in Ireland. Polypharmacy in the elderly will only become a ‘scandal,’ if and when it becomes safe and permissible to criticise the medical profession. This will only happen if and when society comes to realise that it is not in need of much of the medicine it is all-too-frequently prescribed.

    To honestly ameliorate child abuse (or any kind of abuse), one must come to understand and accept the conditions that made it possible, or even inevitable. In my opinion to accomplish this, RTE would first have to be dismantled, and the looking glass would have to be repaired. News must not be subject to the censorship of the market. Unpleasant truths are unpopular truths. They just don’t sell. RTE (like all advertisement dependent media) are compelled to tell us what we want to hear, not what we might need to hear. Scandals must therefore wait until they become marketable before they can actually become scandals.

    The gullible nature of Irish society; our collective willingness to elevate sacred institutions and afford them the blind faith they demand needs to be explored. As a consequence of this blind faith, the only institution capable of exposing abuse whilst the abuse is unfolding; is the abusing institution itself. Neither paedophile nor neonaticide scandals caused the collapse of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Those scandals were common knowledge, they were well known and delicately concealed within the vernacular of the day. They only became scandals because (in the 1980s) the Church had already begun to collapse in the face of increasing capitalism. RTE became free to flog a dying horse; a space in the consumer market had been opened for criticism of the once infallible Church. Those stories could be sold once they had inadvertently received the sanction of the market.

    The market and the multinational are the ultimate arbiters of ‘news’ and how it is to be portrayed in the media. For example, look at the invasion of a highly organised and sophisticated Israeli army into a Third World shantytown, deprived of an infrastructure or organised defence forces; this obscenity is invariably referred to as Israel’s ‘war’ against Hamas. Similarly, the low-wage crisis in Ireland and abroad that permits the rich to get richer, is almost invariably referred to as the: ‘cost of living crisis.’ Media sells ‘news’ to the market and sells advertising pages to the corporations. These two institutions are the moderators of language and subsequently of thought itself.

    Israeli military during ground operations in the Gaza Strip on 31 October

    The Contract

    I suspect my own parents’ along with other generations of parents since Irish independence were locked into a kind of unspoken contract with the Church. One wherein they sublimated the signs and symptoms of systemic child abuse in return for a sense of belonging, and a right to participate in our newly won independence. Having been deprived of that for several centuries perhaps the price was considered to be minimal. Children were not as valued then as they are, at least ostensibly, today.

    By the 1980s in Ireland, Church and state were practically indistinguishable. Being on the outside can (in many ways) be equated to life in a tent on the Grand Canal as an ‘unwanted immigrant sponger.’ Back then, Catholic identity was a fundamental prerequisite for belonging; for education, social mobility; for salvation and all the trimmings. Perhaps it is only now since we have become less dependent upon the Church that we can read the terms upon which the bargain was concluded. Those sick and vile terms make it difficult to determine whether or not the new landlords are any less unsavoury than the one who had been so recently deposed.

    I often wonder who the whistleblowers were over the decades of systemic child abuse in Ireland? I’m sure there were many of them. How were they treated by the authorities? How many were shunned by RTE, and sanctimoniously smeared in the broadsheets like the ‘right-wing loonies’ and ‘anti-vaxxers’ of today?

    Did a significant number of people know what was happening to children, and simply turn a blind eye? What kind of human beings are they? Who were the doctors and officials who visited the laundries or the mother and baby homes, and saw what was happening with their own eyes? Who treated the women and delivered the 796 babies that were dumped into a cesspit in Tuam over a period of thirty-six years? These types of crimes are not perpetrated by a particular priest, a nun, an order, or even a Church. They require a formal bureaucracy and a veritable army of participants. They are crimes that are not perpetrated on society, but rather by society itself.

    I cannot help but wonder if the same silent contract exists today between the mainstream media and our ostensibly more liberal and progressive society? As long as they avoid fixing the cracks in the looking glass, we remain unreservedly committed to buying whatever it’s selling, whether news, vaccines or Renault cars. In a broader sense that same contract defines the type of news we receive, and the type of Ireland we quietly choose to live in.

    ‘Dad!’ I replied to my father in that firm but ineffectual tone that I sometimes effect to inform my kids that I’m being serious. ‘As I’m sure you remember, I was kicked out of boarding school and labelled a ‘bousy’ and a ‘gurrier,’ I said.

    These terms are not in common parlance today, but they are descriptive nouns that were often applied at parent teacher meetings in the seventies and eighties. They are terms that my parents are quite familiar with.

    ‘I imagine,’ I continued, ‘that being a gurrier or a troublemaker offered some protection from the perverts. It was probably the meek and vulnerable kids who were preyed upon. The ones who did well, and did what they were told.’ He digested this for a moment as I’d hoped he would. ‘There might be something in that son, but it wasn’t always the case, the bousies wouldn’t have been believed if they told anyone,’ he said. It then occurred to me that back then whilst my father sent us up to mass on Sundays he rarely attended himself. ‘You were always getting in trouble with your cheek and your big mouth,’ he continued, ‘maybe in a way it kept you safe,’ he sounded somewhat relieved by my reassurance.

    I have never told my Dad, but when I was at boarding school in Moate in the eighties, there was a particular priest or ‘brother’ who acted as a kind of bursar. He would issue small loans to the tune of five pounds (a princely sum in those days), but there was a catch. One had to sit on his knee and have him slip his hand under your shirt and rub your back for five long minutes, before you got the loan. As the end of the month approached, myself and my smoking companions were often reduced to some tobacco dust in the arse of an Old Holborn pouch: lots were drawn and straws were pulled. As far as I can remember I only had to endure one back rub, hardly grounds for complaint when I consider the horrors that so many others have endured.

    As kids, my siblings and I were sent to mass, but I think it was more to keep the neighbours happy and let my parents have some peace on Sunday mornings. It was a half hour walk from our house, through the valley of squinting windows, to the church in Lusk village where I grew up.

    Recently I asked my Dad if there was much known about paedophilia in the Church when he was a boy? He said: ‘there was plenty known about it!’ That he and his pals knew of the priests to be ‘avoided like the plague’. He went as far as to tell me what one Father used to do in the dark of the confessional box whilst questioning boys about their wet dreams and sexual fantasies.

    I write these words not out of a desire to kick at the old bones of Irish Catholicism. Surprisingly perhaps, I feel a kind of sadness at the departure of the Church from Irish society. Just because the Church/State experiment has failed (again), it doesn’t mean that it was entirely devoid of good ideas. For a short time, there were parallels that might be drawn between Plato’s Republic and Catholic Ireland; a society run by saintly philosopher kings disinterested in power, sex and money.

    Perhaps a separate Church and state, antagonistic and fearful of each other might be the next variant of that age-old experiment? It is not unreasonable to argue that without some spiritual compass, a society like ours – one that does not even teach philosophy in its schools – is more vulnerable and prone to the extremes of advanced capitalism that are ravaging the Earth and perhaps also, the soul of humanity as well.

    I recall being fined for attending Mass in Cavan during the Lockdowns. A defiant priest in Mullahoran continued to say mass and refused to lock the doors of his Church. He was repeatedly fined and vilified in the broadsheets. He persisted defiantly for a time even refusing to pay the fines, (as I initially refused to pay mine); but in the end they broke him, (and me), and many others. That courageous priest reminded me of the ones who said mass in the hedges and the ditches at the time of the Penal Laws. What was it the then Taoiseach said about heroes, during one of his televised fear mongering addresses? ‘Not all of them wear capes!’

    Christian philosophy is of course as distinct from priestly messengers, as good health is distinct from doctors. Personally, I enjoy attending mass nowadays; the ceremony, the costumes, the acoustics, the aromas, frankincense and two thousand years of flatulent history. In Joyce’s Ulysses Leopold Bloom expressed a similar kind of reverence for the iconography and the theatre as he sat in a vacant pew in St. Andrew’s Church on Westland Row:

    Letters on his back: I. N. R. I?
    No! I. H. S.
    Molly told me one time I asked her.
    I have sinned: or no:
    I have suffered, it is.
    And the other one?
    Iron nails ran in.

    Ulysses: 5.372-4

    I try to go on those Sundays when I’m not working in the out of hours. Mass is much safer now, it’s like flying with an airline that has just endured a terrible crash, in fact it’s even nicer without the bustle and the crowds. Should they return, I will have to travel to the Buddhist temple at Jampa Ling on the border between Leitrim and Cavan; a calm serene setting for healing and meditation. Naturally there’s a different ethos there; vegetarianism, karma, reincarnation and a different type of magic. For me, however, the basic principles are practically the same. If Christ had been a bit fatter and less confrontational, he could just as easily have been the Buddha.

    On the Sunday following the documentary that had so rattled my father, the parish priest at the little Church in Annagassan (where I live now), almost cried as he spoke about the ‘new’ revelations. To the small gathering of mostly elderly stalwarts, the anguish and hurt in his voice was palpable as he apologised on behalf of the Church. As one of our living literary legends: John Boyne reminds us in his History of Loneliness: the good priest (and nun) have also become a certain kind of victim; one who’s vocational isolation is compounded and who’s suffering is invariably overlooked.

    During the Covid years, at the height of the engineered panic, when my colleagues were being bribed to embrace bizarre draconian policies and an experimental vaccine, several doctors were forced to resign from our posts or be fired. My faith in the medical establishment and much of the enjoyment I once took from my role as a GP, evaporated at that time. Presently I work as a locum, confining myself to immediate medical problems and short-term fixes. Unlike most of my colleagues, I’m no longer contractually engaged by the State to keep people ill. To keep them ‘chronically managed’, maintained, and terminally dependent upon an expensive cocktail of iatrogenic pharmaceuticals.

    Saint Bernadette of Lourdes.

    Christian Heroics

    Last week the ‘relics’ of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes went on display at St Patrick’s in Dundalk. (I can hear the yawns). The impressive Gothic cathedral contains some of the most beautiful mosaic walls in Ireland, and is hardly in need of saintly bones to big it up. Nonetheless, a crowd of several thousand showed up to view the macabre display of desiccated body parts. Had those bones arrived from Lourdes in the eighties, they would have made national headlines. There might have been a day off work for everyone, and an entirely different type of Taoiseach would have been compelled to be represented; to lick ice-creams and hug someone’s grandmother.

    In the late eighties and at the turn of the century many things in Ireland were changing; travel, entertainment, contraception, a shift from varied forms of self-sufficiency to consumption as a national pastime. It was an era of televised heroics; the A-Team, Star Trek, The Dukes of Hazzard, the Incredible Hulk, and a hundred more heroes. As we became wealthier and more overtly American, the old Catholic virtues associated with restraint and frugality were being shed in favour of a new skin. Shopping malls and concert venues were usurping the cathedral in size and scale, and became the new loci for pyrotechnics and Sunday worship.

    The present day is very different from how I imagined it would be when I was a teenager. Back then my friends and I had a saying that helped us explain the uncertainties of life: ‘the plan that you don’t plan is the one that always works out!’ Few in the Catholic hierarchy could have foreseen the changes, even fewer could have imagined they would culminate in the collapse of the Church itself.

    In his Pulitzer prize-winning book: The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker proposes that one of the main drivers behind human behaviour is our desire to go beyond the painful reality of our mortality. We accomplish this by seeking to do something ‘heroic’ with our lives. By becoming heroes; hero Dads, hero Mums, hero criminals, hero Journalists, empire builders etc., we can (in some small measure) cheat death and be present in the world or in people’s minds, after we are gone. The problem with the Church (Becker argues) is that it no longer affords an opportunity for the heroic. It had failed to compete with Magnum PI or Charlie’s Angels.

    The great perplexity of our time, the churning of our age is that the youth have sensed – for better or worse – a great social historical truth: that just as there are useless self-sacrifices in unjust wars, so too is there an ignoble heroics of whole societies: it can be the viciously destructive heroics of Hitler’s Germany, or the plain debasing and silly heroics of the acquisition and display of consumer goods, the piling up of money and privileges that now characterises whole ways of life, capitalist and Soviet. And the crisis of society is the crisis of organised religion too: religion is no longer valid as a hero system, and so the youth scorn it.
    (From The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker: Souvenir Press, 1973 p.197)

    Notwithstanding Father P. J. Hughes in Cavan, today’s Catholic ‘heroes’ are invariably presented in the antithetical form of; fundamentalists holding vigils outside abortion clinics, homophobic protestors, or teachers who embrace prison rather than accept that someone has changed or wishes to change their gender. The rather unchristian unwillingness to see the pain behind the woman presenting for an abortion, or the person desperately struggling with their identity, deprives either activist of any possible heroism. The real heroes of Catholicism are hard to find, the media doesn’t look for them anymore. Neither do they tend to seek public recognition. Many (if not most of them) are passing away; alone, demented, childless in the convents and seminaries that have lately been transformed into nursing homes. Another scandal perhaps? If so then like the others, it too must await the sanction of the market.

    Former St Joseph’s Industrial School in Letterfrack.

    Child Protection?

    It is impossible to see into the future and as such many, or most, of the ills that beset our children today, were not anticipated by the most anxious, or even by the best of parents. My own, having come from the ‘lower’ classes, directly (and indirectly) instilled into me an inflated respect for the ‘class system’. When I left home in my late teens, I was determined to become a ‘somebody’ within that same system; as opposed to becoming self-sufficient and capable of thinking beyond it.

    My generation’s preoccupation with class may have come at the cost of an appreciation for the arts and for nature; the tools that might help us navigate an ubiquitous sense of inadequacy, an obsession with status and material consumption. We may have compounded the ambivalence towards nature and philosophy with an overemphasis on the importance of a certain kind of education for our own kids. Pushing them into universities, eschewing the arts and the ‘lowly’ trades for the ‘white collar’ of a college degree.

    For most young people a university degree (so valued by their parents) amounts to little more than a piece of paper and a pathway to barista work. Many of these young graduates have grown up surrounded by creature comforts. They remain oblivious or disinclined to ascend through the class system their parents have prioritised so much. Today their aspirations are often confined to the digital space; they are beset on all sides by addiction, depression, anxiety, identity, and a precarious social media image. Ills their parents could never have predicted.

    It seems as though each generation of parents is condemned to a similar fate of protecting their children from the wrong sorts of evils. Today’s school lunch scheme is a telling example; disempowering children, removing them from an engagement with their food and from the discipline and time needed to prepare and understand what a nutritious meal really is. There is no attention given to disempowerment, environmental impact, or even nutrition itself! Yet most parents seem to love the recently established ‘free lunch’ programme. My own kids get a hot ‘free lunch’ at their primary school in Annagassan, outside of which there is neither a footpath nor a speed bump.

    Today, across the country some 455 schools are teaching children in rented prefab accommodation. This comes in at a yearly cost to the state of some 23 million euro. At least this winter, one hopes that the chicken nuggets and pizza slices will be easier to heat than the prefabs.

    Had I known then what I know now I would have raised my older children differently. I might have pushed them into carpentry, and would have educated them daily on the twin evils of social media and drug dependence. On top of that I would have taught them how to lift a shovel, turn a sod and plant a seed, as I do now. I did try to teach them to read good literature, and where possible to think independently of the herd.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    Whistleblowers

    Shortly before the economic crash in 2007 economists, most notably David McWilliams and several others were critical of government economic policy and tried to blow the whistle. In 2007 the then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern dismissed the naysayers at a speech in Donegal saying:

    Sitting on the sidelines, cribbing and moaning is a lost opportunity. I don’t know how people who engage in that don’t commit suicide, because frankly the only thing that motivates me is being able to actively change something.

    When I think of a whistleblower, I think of an official who stands on the platform and informs people if and when it’s safe to get off the train. During the pandemic one such whistleblower was Dr Martin Feeley.

    A former Olympian and clinical director of the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group, Martin was part of a small cohort of physicians in Ireland who were critical of Covid policies, including nursing home deaths. He recognised from the outset that only the elderly and the very vulnerable needed protection, and that much of what was going on was not motivated by an interest in public health. Dr Feely was a physician and a gentleman, above and beyond anything the cliche might describe.

    We met each other many times and corresponded throughout the years of madness, I feel honoured to have known him. Having been compelled to resign his post as clinical director in 2020, Martin endured a torrid time as a consequence of speaking the truth and adhering to medical and scientific principles. Like the rest of our small group of naysayers, he was stunned and shunned by former ‘friends’ and colleagues. It was reported that Martin ‘died suddenly at his home’ in December 2023. Whilst I would not wish to burden his family with any speculations on his departure from this world, I have no doubt, (and personal experience informs) that the vitriol and invective he endured from within the medical profession, was a contributing factor to his untimely death.

    Ironically most of those medics who publicly contradicted Covid policy or questioned the administration of the vaccine to children or pregnant women, were either fired or placed under investigation by the regulator? In some cases, they were both fired and placed under investigation. The ongoing inquiries are now in their fourth year, at this stage they must be some of the longest investigations on record at the Irish Medical Council. One colleague, critical of NPHET policy, received his summons for investigation shortly after being discharged from hospital. Another colleague GP who refused to administer the vaccine, was summarily suspended from the register. In September of this year Dr Neville Wilson, a GP with a busy practice in Kilcock Co Kildare, was brought before a Fitness to Practise Hearing at the Medical Council for allegedly ‘making comments disapproving of the use of Covid Vaccines.’ He is presently awaiting a decision in respect of sanctions against him. Two weeks ago, another colleague (and a good friend), a GP with a busy practice in Adare was ordered (as part of his ongoing investigation) to travel to Dublin to attend an occupational health assessment, which includes an assessment of his mental health! In 2020 this same respected GP who runs a thriving and busy clinic in Adare, was compelled to resign from his role as Chairman of Shannon Doc (the out of hours service for the Midwest); after he publicly criticised Covid policy.

    Myself and several other GPs have yet to receive a date for our fitness to practise hearings. The purpose of these interminable prosecutions has an obvious historical precedent. It is a process little different to what those that contradicted the presiding dogma of the day experienced some fifty years ago. Then, as now, the collective injustice endured by Covid policy critics is largely ignored by the media because a majority were complicit in the embrace and execution of those policies. Not one of the doctors presently under investigation have caused harm to a single patient, instead, all are guilty, to a greater or lesser degree, of simply disagreeing with Covid policy, in a manner more benign than the prominent politicians and RTE presenters who publicly flouted the rules with impunity. Of course, there is an element of punishment in all of this, a punishment most acutely felt by the families of those who remain under investigation.

    Adverse Events

    Had I been inclined to inform someone of the harm that was being done by the bursar at my boarding school; where, or to whom could I have reported these adverse events? How would they have been received?

    Today, in order to record or report the adverse consequence or side effects of a Covid vaccine, one’s only recourse is to fill out a seven-page complaint form, obscurely buried on the HPRA website. If you don’t have a Medical Card, it will cost you sixty or seventy euro to bring a suspected side effect to the attention of your GP. If you do manage to get an appointment, he or she will probably dismiss your side effect as: ‘coincidental’ or ‘all in your head’.

    I suspect that Irish GPs are as ill-informed about potential side effects from Covid vaccines as they are (and were) ill-informed about the mechanism and mode of action of these novel genetic ‘vaccines.’ There are no posters in the waiting rooms, no mention of side effects anywhere, outside of some inaccessible small print on the back of a leaflet in the bottom of a box. Thus, one must complain about the medicine to the same people who are being handsomely paid to administer it.

    It is all easy to fall into the trap of becoming a conspiracy theorist or far-right supporter in Ireland. It is within these circles that criticism of almost all kinds is embraced.  The doctors who criticised Covid policy were described as ‘right-wing, anti-vaxxers’, a slur that has not yet lost its resonance. Today the man who was Minister for Health over much of the period of the Covid fiasco – including the period of the nursing home deaths – is presently Taoiseach. That observation alone should be enough to make the most reluctant conspiracy theorist pause and wonder: ‘Who are the king makers?’

    Those who objected during Harris’s term as Minister for Health are presently being prosecuted by the Regulator, or are deceased. To impressionable minds it might read like an episode from the HBO series Succession? Or a pulp fiction drama where behind an entertaining puppetry of politics, a few multinational corporations are in control of state and government. In Ireland truth is no stranger to fiction.

    My dad was reassured by my denial of being abused by the priests or the unchristian brothers at my boarding school in Moate. My abuse was to come in my adult life in a form I could never have predicted. It came not at the hands of the old priests, but at the hands of the new ones: my ‘colleagues’, and from a hopelessly failed and politically controlled Regulator.

    For less than obvious reasons, I fear many people in Ireland don’t want to look back on the Covid period. They would rather move forward towards a hopefully brighter future.  Perhaps the lack of a public outcry for a meaningful Covid inquiry reflects a deeper truth about the Irish public; one that suggests a broader culpability, beyond the pharmaceutical companies, the medical establishment and the political puppetry?

    I have no doubt, however, that a future generation will look back on the Covid years with the same level of disgust and anger that is readily applied today to those clergy that abused children.

    I desperately hope that history does not repeat itself. That fathers will not one day be nervously phone their sons and daughters, apologising for the consequences of decisions that for a time were coerced, mandated and unquestioningly endorsed by the medical hierarchy of today.

    Feature Image: Richard Tilbrook (wikicommons)

  • Ireland Urgently Requires a Covid Inquiry

    It should be a source of embarrassment that in Ireland we still have had no public inquiry into the State’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite talk of terms of reference, nothing has materialized, and nor does this situation seem likely to change during the lifetime of new Taoiseach Harris’s government.

    The mainstream media, which received millions in advertising revenue throughout the pandemic, would appear to have no interest in searching questions being asked. It may not be appetising to recall overwhelmingly uncritical coverage; placing the daily tally of new cases and deaths on their front pages news for almost two years; seemingly oblivious to everything else happening in the world.

    Nor does the main opposition party in Dáil Éireann, Sinn Féin seem gung ho for one either. During the pandemic, they failed to interrogate adequately the domineering, even dictatorial, role of Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan in particular, or the runaway budgets that developed in that period. Despite this spending, our health service appears to be no better equipped to deal with medical emergencies.

    In my view, Sinn Féin (and other opposition parties) should reconsider this stance as it hands a huge political opportunity to opponents on the far right as we enter a period of elections. The Irish people require accountability on this era-defining response.

    For all its faults, and failure to interrogate basic premises, the U.K. Covid inquiry is at least holding power to account. That inquiry implicitly acknowledges that extraordinary and unprecedented measures were taken, undermining basic civil liberties, and causing grave harms, including to children denied education and those caught in situations of domestic violence. The damage to our collective mental healths may be more difficult to quantify.

    A self-fulling prophecy

    Writing for the Irish Times on May 23 2020 clinical psychologist and author Maureen Gaffney reckoned that ‘Covid-19 has scored a direct hit on our most basic psychological drives.’ She seemed oblivious, however, to how statements such as her own that ‘the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic may have changed life more permanently’ might have been contributing to the anxiety of her readers.

    The direct health impact of what Peter Hitchens acutely described as ‘the Great Panic of 2020’ are fairly obvious. But the ripple of psychological effects is less easy to assess. Psychological injury, or so-called nervous shock, is difficult to quantify in law. A successful claim requires reasonable foreseeability, and the presence of a duty of care.

    Dr Gabor Maté, in particular, has pointed to the effect of stress and trauma on our health. Thus, if a national leader with a duty of care says that thousands of people are likely to die from a deadly disease and imposes a stay-at-home order for an indefinite time period, serious collateral damage in terms of stress and even trauma is reasonably foreseesable. Unless they are working from a firm evidence basis and/or a robust rational, political leaders should exercise great caution in making such pronouncements or laws.

    A 2017 study demonstrated that people who feel lonely report worse cold symptoms than individuals who are not. The exacerbating factor of loneliness on Covid symptoms may be just the tip of the iceberg.

    In 2020 Dr Marcus de Brun highlighted in this magazine how psychological stress would be a major determinant in one’s experience with Covid-19: ‘Psychological stress is (medically speaking),’ he said, ‘a self-fulling prophecy. People who are most anxious about becoming ill are most likely to become ill. If you ask yourself often enough whether or not you have a headache, you will eventually experience one.’

    The experience of photographer Barry Delaney also writing for Cassandra Voices is instructive:

    By early March a few cases were being recorded in Ireland, the media went into hysterical frenzy, almost shaming the inevitable innocent cases.

    Then I got an email to say that my next project was now cancelled. Devastated, I went for my usual swim, sometimes the magic water doesn’t work, it didn’t that day. I came home frozen, riddled with fear, no work, fear of how to pay my rent; suddenly I became unwell. A sore throat and mild fever, paralysed me, as I lay alone on my sofa.

    But no cough. Back then the only symptom mentioned was the hacking cough. I checked my phone and there was now talk of Ireland entering lockdown around St Patrick’s Day. Armageddon was arriving  Supermarkets running out of food, even fucking toilet paper. I was now in a delirious state of panic.

    The next day the fever went, but I still had the sore throat. On the Monday I tried phoning my Doctor; no answer; permanently engaged or just automated messages to contact some new HSE hub.

    I was now in a state of constant anxiety, with no food in the house, and yet I couldn’t leave home. and I live alone.

    I phoned my ex wife. She kindly said she’d shop for me. On St. Patrick’s Day Leo made his grim, great speech. I still felt he knew something that he wasn’t telling us. Maybe this virus was as deadly as the Spanish flu of 1918-20 that killed up to fifty million, including my grand-uncle aged just nineteen. Death figures of 85,000 were being predicted in Ireland by our Fear driven media.

    All that week I had an intermittent sore throat, but still could not get in contact with my Doctor.

    The thing to watch for was the breathlessness I had heard. This was what caused the dangerous pneumonia. On the Saturday night I went to bed early alone, and suddenly had problems breathing. It being Saturday I could not disturb my Doctor, nor did I want an ambulance arriving to take me to quarantine in hospital, where I’d be met by Hazmat-clad Doctors and become Patient No. 3. Laid low by fear and shortness of breath I could not sleep. By 5am I made a decision to complete my final book, Americans Anonymous and get my things in order in case this was it.

    Barry’s panic is likely to have been replicated across the population.

    Around for a lot longer than initially understood

    Yet Covid-19 had been around for a lot, lot longer than we imagined by the time in February 2020 it was presented to us as a SARS-like illness. Indeed, Spanish virologists found traces of the novel coronavirus in a sample of Barcelona waste water collected in March 2019, some nine months before it was identified in China, according to the University of Barcelona. Similarly, a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) of Italy found that it was circulating in Italy in September, 2019.

    Even the first Irish death attributed to Covid-19 demonstrates that the panic of March, 2020, when cases seemed to be spreading from Europe, was unfounded.

    That patient presented himself at Cork University Hospital on February 29th, 2020, days before the first confirmed case (via a PCR test) of COVID-19 in the Republic. Analysis later established the particular strain in his case showed ‘very little difference’ from the original strain from China’s Hubei province, and had none of the characteristic mutations found in strains then prevalent in Bavaria or Lombardy.

    The man, however, had no epidemiological link to any area where the virus was prevalent at the time or any link to a confirmed case.

    All this vindicates Oxford’s Professor Sunetra Gupta, assessment from the outset that Covid-19 had been circulating for months prior to the imposition of lockdowns, and was far less deadly than assumed by Imperial’s Professor Neil Ferguson in his famous paper. Tellingly, it was hardly registering in our hospitals in the winter of 2019-2020.

    Long Covid

    It may be that many of the symptoms associated with Long Covid or ‘long haulers’ as sufferers are known in the U.S., are the product of that collective panic; a combination of disease and trauma locked bodies over months of painful lockdowns.

    In March 2021 Adam Gaffney, an assistant professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, argued for a more critical appraisal of Long Covid. Having expressed scepticism around a condition characterised by symptoms such as ‘brain fog’, he recalls being contacted by a journalist who said: ‘I’m asking as much as a person as a journalist because I’m more terrified of this syndrome than I am of death.’

    Gaffney acknowledges ‘myriad long-term effects, including physical and cognitive impairments, reduced lung function, mental health problems, and poorer quality of life’ from severe bouts of COVID-19 – long recognised as post-viral syndrome – but cites a survey showing two-thirds of ‘long haulers’ had negative coronavirus antibody tests, and another, organised by self-identifying Long Covid patients indicating around two-thirds of those surveyed had undergone blood testing reported negative results.

    He asserted: ‘it’s highly probable that some or many long-haulers who were never diagnosed using PCR testing in the acute phase and who also have negative antibody tests are “true negatives.’ In other words, for many this may have been a disease with a psychological origin, which Gaffney attributes to ‘skyrocketing levels of social anguish and mental emotional distress,’ referencing a paper showing that about half of people with depression also had unexplained physical symptoms.

    Class Action?

    Investigating the consequences of that social anguish may, in fact, be one of the less contentious matters which any COVID-19 Inquiry in Ireland would consider, as members of the government could reasonably point to the global hysteria, in large part generated by social media.

    What is likely to have deterred the government from setting up an inquiry in the first place is a fear of a class action from relatives of care home residents, who seem to have died unnecessarily: Ireland experienced the second highest proportion of care home deaths in the world, during what is called, inaccurately the first wave, of spring 2020.

    Throughout, Irish people were effectively lied to, via a compliant media, regarding the nature of deaths from COVID-19. Thus, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) adopted WHO guidance listing COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death when:

    confirmed by laboratory testing irrespective of severity of clinical signs or symptoms.

    diagnosed clinically or epidemiologically but laboratory testing is inconclusive or not available.

    Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan even acknowledged a remarkably low threshold in April, 2020: ‘Clinically, the “index of suspicion” for the disease would be “a good deal higher” than would normally be the case for flu.’

    Our democracy demands an inquiry into what led our government to take many of their decisions. Was it simply a lack of expertise that led the State to adopt flawed policies, or did they know more than we have been told?

    How is it possible that decision-making was almost entirely devolved to the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dr Tony Holohan in 2020?

    We must also scrutinise the manner in which subsequent decisions were taken on masks, further lockdowns, and perhaps most insidiously, vaccine passports.

    If indeed we are to prevent the precedent of the COVID-19 response changing life more permanently, questions need to be answered. It is incumbent on the main opposition parties, Sinn Féin to demand this of the government, and promise one to the electorate if they come to power. If not, I suspect the far right will continue to make inroads into their support.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Podcast: China, COVID-19 and the Viscount

    Listen to Part 2 (Bonus Episode) by subscribing (from just €5 p.m.) on Patreon.

    You can also listen to Part 2 (Bonus Episode) by subscribing (from €15 p.a. for all episodes) on Apple Podcasts.

    Did COVID-19 originate from a pathway connected to China’s trade in wildlife-for-consumption, or did laboratory activity trigger the pandemic? Where do things stand with the so-called Lab Leak Hypothesis? One thing is for sure: in this pressing matter, one of the hardest combined attitudes to take is to be both engaged and polite.

    Many combatants, previously capable of professional comportment, have descended into bare knuckle insults of the kind academe has not seen since the world decided one must be on the Left or the Right, or that one should comport oneself responsibly in the face of a Cold War that may become hot. Are you on the right side of history, or involved at all? You are either ready for flak, in this situation, or keep your head down.

    Many scientists with an opinion worth sharing are choosing not to do so.

    They might be wise. After all, some of this fighting has gotten dirty. Where some engaged in respectable debate before, rivals are now trying to cancel and professionally immolate one another. Direct exchange rather than article or book writing now makes up the majority of this discourse. Peer-reviewed articles on either side of this exchange have been few. Before you say – ‘That’s because there’s no evidence for the lab-leak’, or ‘That’s because there’s no evidence for the wet market/ zoonosis’, consider this: the Chinese government most likely had insight, and most likely destroyed evidence related to one or the other.

    Viscount Matt Ridley, our interviewee here, has been both interested and engaged with the question of the virus origin since the start. He has been so without lapsing into ad hominem jibes. Though he has lapsed into Twitter exchanges of fire, his manner throughout has been civil. He stands with scientists, skilled researchers and a majority of the public in thinking that COVID-19 resulted most probably in a misadventure connected to a Chinese lab.

    This does not mean he is correct.

    Why is it important to point this out? In a context where both sides of a highly contentious argument disagree over all but the smallest of premises, the question of decency – and its cousin attributes honesty and responsibility – does come to the fore. Decency is also a cousin of openness by the way, and as we encircle in our conversation, China’s rulers have been anything but open. Therefore, take a listen to this exchange, and a look at Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book, as a start about posing this question for yourself. For all of us who lived through the pandemic, and in memory of those who didn’t, asking questions about its origins remains a primary part of the aftermath.

    Read Luke Sheehan’s account of his time in China, published by The Lilliput Press.