The Hard Conversation

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...

There is mounting evidence which will I believe confirm that the COVID-19 strategy being adopted by most countries is misguided and irresponsible. The number of deaths and the pressure on health services through poverty, unemployment, crime, drug abuse etc. will be far greater than those caused by the virus. The early predictions that millions and then hundreds of thousands were going to die have already been verified as wildly inaccurate. The best data coming from Stanford and Yale suggest that the deaths will be one in a thousand. Furthermore Dr John Ioannidis of Stanford claims that the majority of these deaths are older people in nursing homes or else front line health care workers. He also contends that 99% of those that die will have at least two underlying conditions. Statistics tell us that 2.9 million Americans die on average every year. In the last 3 months 62 thousand have died as a result of the virus. 65% of these are in old age homes. What percentage ...

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...