Coming back to normal

Humans actively avoid simplicity. We crave complications because we erroneously assume it makes our lives somehow better. Some of us broke free from the mundane household repetitions by exploring our immediate surroundings. In my case, this involved sneaking out past my 2km quarantine limit and jumping off the empty Blackrock diving tower. I learned from this that God is not in the little things, but in those glorious moments when you don’t get caught.

Yes, the deaths were awful. Ireland has 1,673 COVID victims to date, but it was largely a plague on the houses of the elderly. Many BAME people died disproportionately, as did front-line health-care workers and those suffering from type-2 diabetes. For Ireland, our death-toll would have been far less if we had acted quicker or if we had utilised our island’s natural defences.

All in all, our lack of conurbations helped immensely, and the unspoken yet general feeling is; at least we’re not the UK, a nation so badly governed that the cliche of Lions being led by Donkeys doesn’t fit. With a death rate of nearly 60,000, Boris Johnson’s leadership is more akin to a monkey who has ingested far too much expresso. The simple adage of “no government would be better than this one” does actually apply to the Tories in England, especially if you consider that Ireland has yet to form a government since our February election resulted in a hung parliament. This minor detail hasn’t stopped us lifting lockdown measures a few days ago. Okay, officially we are at Phase 2 of a four-phase plan. We still can’t have mass gatherings. We can only travel inside our county regions. The pubs aren’t

open until the end of June. None of this matters though because one truly seismic event has occurred to let us know that for the time being at least, we are back to normal;

THE SHOPS ARE OPEN.

I’m just back from Galway city centre where I spent the last four hours wandering through bookshops, buying Stephen King’s latest offering (Amazon? Never!), browsing sporting goods stores, wondering if it’s wise to actually get Malina the crossbow she wants for her upcoming birthday? Shop assistants are helpful, over-friendly and slightly stalker-ish, in many ways like the teenage version of de Burca when I started trying to get girls to go out with me. There are lots of discounts and deals, as Retail Ireland begins to dig itself out of a virus-shaped hole. It seems the public are keen to help. IKEA in Dublin has persistently long queues with people arriving at 5.30am to wait in line for the 10.30am opening.The streets are not quite packed, but busy.

Cafe’s operate at take-away level and most have long social distancing queues outside them. Thanks to our weekly 350euro unemployment benefit to anyone who lost their job, there is an air of quiet optimism among the masses, especially among those who previously only earned 200euro a week. The Irish never let a small mathematical discrepancy come between us and this is why our good friends the banks are set to pocket an extra €100million off the back of struggling mortgage holders.The financial institutions are going to controversially continue piling on the interest during payment breaks designed to help customers – and it will be added to the total cost of the loan.

But the Irish are smiling. I know this because hardly anyone wears a face-mask. If there is a recession on the way, you wouldn’t really know it. A house beside my mother is on sale for 460,000 and an offer of 415,000 has already been refused. Listen hard you can hear the slow grind of the economy working off the rust and moving through the gears. Hotels are booked out for the months of July and August with the new buzzword of “stay-cation” being annoyingly overused. Holidaying in our own country is the new normal for the Irish who have currently put the potential prospect of a second wave of COVID on the long-finger.

The sad thing for me is that these events in Ireland matter little. In a week I will be behind the wheel of our trusty Nissan Qashqai, guiding the de Burca’s through Northern France, Belgium and Germany, heading towards Silesia and the rest of our lives.