Country Living with Francis Farragher

It is kind of strange how major events of this world act as memory markers for us. From an Irish context, there’s the Great Famine of the 1840s, the 1916 Rising, the World Wars, and of late the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

And of course there’s the ‘big one’ – that time in our lives when the word Covid entered our vocabulary and we found ourselves freewheeling into a world of restrictions that just a few weeks before their introduction would have been unimaginable.

There are also little incidental chats about when something happened or how long such-a-one has been dead which ends with the inevitable question: “Was it before or after the Covid?”

It’s easy too of course with the benefit of hindsight to look back at the raft of restrictions which were piled on top of us ordinary ‘God fearing’ people, such as not being able to travel more than three miles from our homes and having to have paperwork in your car to present at Garda checkpoints on the way to and from work.

We all hated the concept of the €9 meal if you wanted to have a pint in the local or the hassle of having to put on your face mask every time you move from your desk at work . . . but there were a lot worse things going on too.

I remember chatting to friends in the earlier and more draconian phases of the Covid restrictions who had been unable to visit parents in nursing homes as their loved ones entered the final days of their lives.

This was all brought into focus over the past week or so by a former member of NPHET (remember that, the National Public Health Emergency Team), Professor Martin Cormican at the University of Galway.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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