The Hard Conversation

The current obsession the world has with trying to eradicate risk from our daily lives is not a result of the pandemic. The pandemic has just taken it to another level. In fact this desire to alleviate all risk from our lives has been at the core of how society has been changing over the last 30 years at least. At some point we transitioned from seeing structure and control as a mechanism to maintain our freedoms to a situation where we impose controls as a means of eliminating as much risk as we can from every situation possible. At the same time modern technologies were being developed at a rate which the world has never experienced before. This meant that the tools were increasingly available to allow governments and their offshoots to impose greater and greater control. It’s hard to know which fed which but the outcome is clear. To facilitate this trend legislation was required. Rules and regulations had to be imposed. This led to an avalanche of bureaucrats and consul...

The most significant death that could emanate from this pandemic is that of the free world. To the flat earther's I suggest “maybe the world is round after all “. Extreme levels of fear make us hysterical. Hysteria makes us irrational and leads to the kind of reaction we might expect from people who are prepared to trample on their friends and relatives in order to get out of a burning building. Conversely when we are in control and being rational we make perfectly good decisions every day balancing risk and reward. Will I cross the street here? Will I buy that car? What restaurant should we eat in? we balance our decisions based on whether we might get run down or can I afford that car or will we like the food in that restaurant etc. etc. For the past three months the world has been in a state of hysteria. We are not processing any risk and reward calculations because of fear. Since the fire alarm went off we are convinced that the building is burning to the ground and no...

We must lift the lockdown with immediate effect which means we should aim for June the 1 st . Meanwhile we should allow people to move around freely from a social perspective. Over the next 2 weeks businesses and other organisations should prepare themselves to open. This requires leadership and courage. Our leaders must balance the risks and the  implications of all options. Any sensible scrutiny will establish two things. Firstly that we can’t afford to keep the economy locked down and that it must be opened up fully, not partially. Secondly that the people will not agree with you initially because of the level of hysteria that has been generated in the past two months. We must all dig deep and have courage but the leaders must lead. They don’t have the luxury as has become common practice to check if the people will agree with them before doing anything. The initial reaction by governments was understandable. People wanted action and they needed to do something to sat...

Irish people would want to start standing up for themselves. We are being used as a political football by bigger nations who have their other own mix of agendas. The first thing to do is to start standing up for ourselves to each other. The continuous wallowing in doom and gloom and the blame game is destroying our belief and own self confidence and is hugely self destructive. Problems must be faced in order to deal with them. In order to face them we must be honest and have perspective. The blame game is cancerous for two reasons, firstly revenge never gets you what you want, and secondly it affords you the luxury of not blaming yourself for any portion of where we are. Most have played some part in the excesses of the past decade even if its was only buying the television we couldn’t afford or buying a fancy car that we didn’t need. I believe it is important to be truthful with ourselves because that is the first stop in accepting we are where we are, and moving on. The...