Opinion: The nanny state is well and truly in charge now

This week's Cavanman's Diary

Hard cases, they say, make bad law. Another week has passed and sport followers across the land remain locked out from seeing their teams play. Players can go to battle in full-contact matches on football, soccer and rugby fields as much as they like; that is safe, we are told.

But what isn’t safe is to stand behind the wire, wearing a mask if needs be and not two but 22 metres away from the next person, watching the players wrestle, grapple and collide.

I had an interesting discussion with a follower of a ladies football team in Monaghan this week. Their team won the county championship; unfortunately and shamefully, no supporters were allowed to attend their county final win or, indeed, any of their matches in the lead-up.

One of their players is based in the UK and could not travel home for matches because she would have had to quarantine for two weeks, which made it impossible with her other commitments.

However, in the Ulster Club championship, they have been drawn against a side from the north. The player can now freely come over for the match and play without the need to isolate for a fortnight.

And the supporters are delighted because, as the game is to be played in the Six Counties, they are now permitted to attend; had it been on their home pitch, that would have been deemed too dangerous.

How ridiculous.

I am involved in handball. In terms of playing, this year is a write-off for me but that’s fine, I will survive. It is our juveniles I feel sorry for.

Handball is a non-contact sport. Okay, it’s indoors, but we are currently in ‘big alley’ season. The court used at this time of year measures 1800 square feet of floor space; there is no ceiling, just a high galvanised roof, akin to a barn. In this traditional form of the game, which is essentially the old outdoor courts only with a light roof to keep off the rain, there are no heating systems re-circulating air.

Yet no doubles handball is allowed, even at juvenile level. Doubles is a staple of the sport, bringing in the team element to what is, for the most part, an individual game. It’s crucial for bringing on youngsters.

The situation that currently pertains is that a teenager can go to school and sit in a classroom with 25 others during the day but that evening, he or she cannot enjoy their sport in a space twice the size with high walls, no ceiling and much more ventilation.

These nonsensical guidelines emanate from well-meaning administrators following advice from the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET). I don’t doubt NPHET's motives; what bugs me is that they cannot be questioned.

If Covid case numbers go down, NPHET are right and are lionised as heroes (I am not speaking figuratively – these well-renumerated public servants are literally called heroes), saving the nation. If case numbers rise, NPHET are still right, it’s just that we are not listening and adhering to what we are told to do.

Decision-making without accountability like that is never a good idea. We are long past that, though, when those who even raise the point are liable to be dismissed as tin-foil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists. I said as much to a friend recently. His response? “Okay, calm down, Jim Corr…”

What the lockdown and the reaction it subsequently provoked in Ireland proved is that the nanny state is in charge now, once and for all. Personal autonomy has been pushed to the margins.

This is what has led to our immoral compo culture and to the rise of political correctness, where, for example, to question something so unsettling as a child identifying as 'gender fluid' (this means, according to Wikipedia, that their gender identity shifts between masculine and feminine) is to invite scorn.

This ostracisation of those who dare to dissent is a hallmark, surely, of an oppressive society, not a liberal one. A groupthink has descended here; the national media, in the main, has shifted left and those in the centre, or on the conservative side, have been stranded. Four legs good, two legs bad, as Orwell put it.

The most fascinating example for me of how we, in this country, have become a nation of cheerleaders came during the lockdown, when the fetishisation of our frontline workers reached a level on a par with the growing obsession in the UK with poppy culture, where we see everything from football mascots to pet dogs adorning the remembrance poppy.

It has lingered on for months. I covered a football match recently, which was preceded by a minute’s silence “for the frontline workers, out there fighting for us on a daily basis”. If you didn’t know better, you would think we were talking about the Battle of the Somme! Have we lost our collective minds?

Personal responsibility was a phrase mentioned by Cavan county board chairman Kieran Callaghan in his interview with this newspaper a couple of weeks ago. In my opinion, this notion is sacrosanct.

We all assess the level of acceptable risk in everything we do, countless times daily, be that crossing the road, pulling out of a junction or boiling the kettle. Yes, we must have the rule of law but, when that law is so plainly off-kilter, disproportionate, not rooted in common sense and ignorant of the whole premise of personal responsibility, it is fatally flawed.

While we should have been protecting the elderly in our nursing homes, we had the Taoiseach telling us we were “a great nation” and quoting soundbites from movies. His popularity ratings soared.

While we should have been questioning what we were being told – something that is our inalienable right – we were too busy dismissing as cranks those who dared.

While the national media – who continue to report on almost 1800 Covid deaths, even though HIQA have downgraded the excess deaths to less than half of that - should be asking serious questions, they are reporting daily on briefings from The Adults, who chide us for living our lives and tell us, as if we were toddlers, to wash our hands.

And now, while we should be able to safely attend a sporting event, we are told we are not responsible enough to do so.

It’s time we got a grip of reality.

Above: Players from Ramor United and Butlersbridge contest the throw-up in front of a deserted stand in their Intermediate Championship match.