The virus has demonstrated that we still have the national capacity to come together and unite against a common threat, writes John McGuirk
This column is usually about criticising politicians and identifying all the things wrong with the country. No doubt, it will be just that again in the future, but it’s been very hard to find anything to fault in Ireland over the past couple of weeks.
Most people of my relatively young vintage have never truly known the meaning of that ancient Chinese curse – “may you live in interesting times”. Even 9/11, that blackest of days, pales into insignificance, though we all remember where we were. I was in economics class, preparing for my Leaving Cert, for example.
In my old school, St Macartan’s in Monaghan, the deputy principal wheeled the television right into the middle of Mr Murphy’s class at about two in the afternoon, just in time for 30 of us to watch in horror, and a kind of morbid fascination, as the second plane struck its target.
The impact of that one event shaped the past two decades of global politics like no other, but the strange thing is that it left Ireland relatively untouched. It’s hard to think of anything that might have happened, or not have happened, here, if Muhammed Atta and his friends hadn’t boarded those planes.
Coronavirus (Covid-19) will not be the same. It’s funny, when you live through a world-historical event, that sometimes you don’t think about it being something that will be remembered hundreds of years from now, but that’s what this is.
‘Emergency’
When all of us – me writing this, and you reading it – are dead, there will be eight-year-old children alive today who will be telling their grandchildren that they lived through the coronavirus crisis. When I was a child, I asked my grandmother, God rest her, who lived through the last ‘emergency’ – World War II – what it was like. Our children and grandchildren will be the ones answering those questions in the future.
This country has undergone immense social and political change in the last 20 years. Some of it good, some of it not so good, and some of it downright terrible. But all of it pales into relative insignificance beside this thing. If coronavirus has a bright side, then this might be it.
The virus has demonstrated, at least, that we still have the national capacity to come together and unite against a common threat. The things that divide us – like politics – don’t matter all that much. Which is why the general election feels like it happened two years ago, and not just seven weeks ago.
The sight of long-retired doctors and nurses returning to duty this past week has been something that embodies the very best of us, both as a country and a human race.
Here we have people, some of them elderly, all of them with families, deliberately walking into hospital wards to expose themselves to a bug that kills, in Italy at least, nearly one in 10.
The people cancelling weddings and holidays and trips to Tayto Park, just to try and limit the spread, even though most of them have nothing to fear at all”
Teachers are finding new ways to teach classes, remotely, often spending hours emailing work to and from their students. Many businesses – and this isn’t being talked about enough – are shouldering the burden of paying their employees to stay at home, sometimes at risk to the business itself.
Throughout the history of our species, the best of humanity has always shone brightest in the darkest hour. On 9/11, there were firemen, with young children waiting for them at home, who ran into the fire to save others. Many of them didn’t make it back out.
Advice
Then there are the ordinary people – millions of us – who aren’t doing much except obeying medical advice from the Government and inconveniencing ourselves. The people cancelling weddings and holidays and trips to Tayto Park, just to try and limit the spread, even though most of them have nothing to fear at all.
Most of us, remember, are doing these things for no selfish reason, because for most of us, the virus itself would be harmless. For someone my age, it might not even result in any symptoms at all. The damage that most of us will feel will be to our economic, not our physical, health.
Our children will be able to answer that the whole world united, at enormous cost, to save the lives of the weakest”
But it all must be done, because – and this is what we’ve realised – life is precious, and worth defending.
The lives of the old, and the sick, and the vulnerable. The price tag for saving their lives will run into tens of billions in Ireland, and trillions around the globe. And yet, as a species, we’ve decided, without a second thought, that it’s no price at all.
There’s a lesson to pass on to your children, and for them to pass onto theirs – when they’re asked, as they will be, what the coronavirus crisis was and what caused it, they’ll be able to answer that the whole world united, at enormous cost, to save the lives of the weakest.
Though it may feel rough now, one day, this crisis will be an example to future generations of the very best of us.
Look after yourselves, and your families.