Letters from the Irish Lockdown- Letter Three:

Hello again world from Ireland.

Well Monday 18th has come and gone and really there was very little change from the previous Friday. In that the traffic had already increased with people having been venturing out and a couple more places are open which weren't open before. What had been announced and was a welcome announcement from me was that face masks/coverings were recommended for people to use venturing out and doing shopping. And who find themselves in enclosed spaces. As of this moment, I can really see no difference to last week. As I have mentioned in my previous post, I am going to continue to do what I was doing and wear my face mask if I intend on going in to pick up essentials..Garden centres and hardware stores are open which is welcome for a lot of people. Also, business that not many people think of as being essential (but really are in this day and age: IT services, electrical and phone repair shops)  are all back open as well. Also golf courses and tennis courts (under very strict conditions).   Some of the pubs are complaining that the 2 metre rule (which has been keeping people safe in this blogger's opinion) should be moved to one metre.   In fact, the two metre rule has cause consternation with more people in the last week calling for the two metre rule to be scrapped.  I believe that this would be a terrible catastrophic mistake to make as the question would arise, if a second wave of the virus hit (which it might) how ready would we be. Already there are hospitals in France dreading a resurge in the virus. In face in some countries (as discussed in the previous blog) this would seem to be the case. Thankfully a medium term solution seems to have been found without the pubs endangering people's lives by insisting on opening earlier than planned. And thankfully the taoiseach has said that there will be no change to the two metre rule. 

As I had mentioned briefly before, it would seem that the government are indeed planning on bringing back horse racing. But the racing will now take place behind closed doors (unlike the fiasco which was Cheltenham. Other activities have returned too in a limited capacity. At least people will be able to venture out to more places now. It's a good sign, however I do hope that things don't regress in regards to progress of eradication in the community. A worrying development occured over the weekend, the local market was shut down due to social distancing concerns. 

In good environmental news, it was recorded that emissions were down by 17% in Ireland with worldwide emissions dropping also. With some speculating that this could be the biggest drop in emmissions since World War Two.This is good news for Ireland as year on year we had continuously failed to meet our environmental target. However, this is by no means a panacea to the issue of environment and the fact that 2019 was the hottest year ever in Europe.  And Ireland is still abysmal record on sustainability. Indeed looking at the evidence the question that Irish people and indeed the world has to ask is, do we continue down the path of destruction that we are obviously going down given this new data. Or do we learn from it and make the changes needed.