The small child trailing her parents around the supermarket last Christmas Eve had evidently had enough. This came after Taoiseach Micheál Martin warned that having “a meaningful Christmas” depended on getting the numbers down, and before Tánaiste Leo Varadkar told Irish people abroad not to fly home for Christmas. The blizzard of speculation over Christmas is infuriating and infantilising. They’re not asking, for example, how many positive cases will slip through the net of the new travel plan. If the public is kept preoccupied with Christmas, they’re not testing the Government’s self-congratulatory claims that “Level 5 worked” – when in fact data suggests it was Level 3 that worked.

Source: The Irish Times November 14, 2020 01:00 UTC