Irish Examiner View: Beating the pandemic - Be resolute, stay at home this weekend

How we behave over the coming days will reveal more about what we are really like, what values we really hold dear, than any moment since Pope John Paul II visited Ireland in 1979.

That visit was planned as a catalyst to rejuvenate a waning Catholic church but it was, as history, empty churches, and parishes without priests confirm, a dramatic swansong.

The sincerity of the 2.5m people who welcomed Karol Wojtyla over those autumn days was not questioned then but their commitment to the ideals, the obligations he demanded, can be.

One scandal after another, one harrowing report after another, one throw-off-the-shackles referendum result after another, makes it impossible to ignore the ambivalence weakening modern Ireland’s relationship with formal Catholicism.

That we would, in ordinary circumstances, mark Good Friday more or less as we mark any Friday shows how advanced that sundering is.

What was once a mandatory day of institutionalised penance and austere abjection now goes almost unnoticed.

We cannot, however, have an ambivalent, an à la carte, relationship with coronavirus.

The risks are far too high, the odds far too sharp. The consequences would be, as they are already are for so many, devastating.

This Easter weekend, as Met Éireann predicts a number of beautiful spring days with temperatures as high as 19ºC, a population champing at the bit after weeks of very difficult, self-imposed isolation may be tempted to ask the dangerous what-harm-could-it-do question and contemplate a brief break out.

That is entirely understandable, especially for those confined in a city-centre apartment or, say, a large family living cheek-by-jowl in a less than generous space.

However, breaking the stay-at-home self-discipline carries risk utterly disproportionate to any passing relief a jaunt in the sunshine might bring.

Not only would it put those who defy clearly-stated regulations in jeopardy, it runs the risk of turning uninfected people into carriers, albeit unaware carriers, of this wretched plague.

It would, knowingly or otherwise, perpetuate this contemporary Gethsemane.

Government anticipates an ignorant minority will flout these disciplines — many already have — and have entrusted gardaí with temporary powers. That these are in place is welcome, that they are necessary far less so. That welcome is supported by uncomplicated and unambiguous figures.

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Britain had, earlier this week, suffered more than 7,000 Covid-19 deaths while we have (again the figure is from earlier this week) fewer than 250.

If the death rates were proportionate to populations — Britain’s is 64m, ours is barely 5m — then we should have a far higher death toll.

That we do not shows that the policies pursued are working and that the great, unflinching efforts of all concerned are, in the midst of this blind, callous pandemic, paying the ultimate dividend — they are keeping people, our parents, our children, our neighbours and friends, alive.

Let’s not take this for granted. Let’s, this trying, sunny weekend, find the fortitude to stay at home so this wretched pandemic can pass as quickly as it might.