[secfirstmd]

Agreed. To be honest the minute Fianna Fail came into government things slipped a bit and it feels like the pressure from business was allowed overwhelm the health advice. It was plainly obvious what was going to happen when they opened up. The annoying thing was that the last year was wasted by not increasing emergency capacity in ICU and getting the correct processes in place to create a fast roll-out of vaccination. Right now they are two weeks in a one one week delayed and only doing 40k a week at max.

I think also we allowed ourself to be "ah sure we can't do that here" compared to New Zealand. The short term economic aspect of things blinded us. If you were coming to the country as the case in the NZ, you should be in mandatory hotel quarantine which all the strict rules in place as needed. With the exception of essential services like hauliers. Every one says in Ireland things can't be done, they can be and people will die because we weren't brave enough to make tougher calls. We would be in much better shape if we had of. Don't get me started on the mess up North throughout the whole thing.

Ultimately though this is about people taking individual responsibility. It's frustrating everyone blaming the government, I have many friends in frontline services and the irresponsibility of some over christmas was crazy. People's friends and family are suffering for it now.

[randompwd]

Any Irish response or strategy is gonna be hobbled by the Northern Ireland lax response. We can't just shut the NI border, either legally or politically.

Which is unfortunate.