Nobody wants to talk about Belmullet: why?

 Last week an article appeared in the Irish Times about the extraordinary case loads that occured in the LEA of Belmullet in Mayo.  Mayo, as some might know, had one of the lowest Covid 19 caseloads in the country until December of 2020. On 14th Jan, RTE reported that the town had the highest level in the country: 6000 cases per 100,000 of population. In other words, 1 in 17 people. In the area, 760 people had tested positive in the previous weeks.  The area takes in the town of Belmullet (c.1000), Achill (c.2500) and about 8000 others in West Mayo. The surge began in Christmas week with 266 cases reported in the last 2 weeks of December.  Yet the media stayed silent.

On 22nd Jan, Irish Times chimed in with a detailed, and honest evaluation of the situation in Belmullet, including discussions with public health experts in Mayo and Galway, who all expressed the same thing: the problem resulted from a particular pattern of socialising in the area, which included a significant number of people booking into a local hotel in order to bypass newly reinstated restrictions from 24th Dec. Seemingly there was a gathering that amounted to as many as 400 people, with people climbing in window and handing drinks out windows to friends they invited along. All dismissed the by now common blame which the rest of the media was putting upon the government for not stopping flights (actually, there was a UK flight ban from 20th to 31st Dec).

Thin articles in the Examiner ignored the roots of the surge, preferring instead of have a go at government by pointing out that the local GP had contracted covid and had to hold surgery by phone because no locum was available.  The article finished with the spiteful remark that outsiders were not welcome in the area at the moment.  (Perhaps that might help explain why no locum was available?)  Another article 2 weeks earlier mentioned that the people of the area were "living in fear", and managed to get a local FG councillor to talk: "The saddest thing that I’ve seen – some people that were so careful, have it. They don’t know how in the name of God they got it... I was going around the houses, dropping stuff off, and there’s people looking out the window at you, crying. It’s savage."

Article from the Independent were worse, literally from the beginning imputing blame on returning UK emigrants (something specifically denied by public health). There was silence on the alleged large scale Christmas events in the town on Stephen's Day except for the Irish Times article. But since that, nothing.

Its really hard to find out how this managed to occur - but this Tripadvisor review with its cocky response from the operator might give a hint.  It indicates a degree of covid skepticism in the area that had spread into local hotels.  Here is a different hotel, with the same casual attitude. And yet, almost nobody in the media seemed to have any interest whatsoever in investigating further. What's clearly obvious is that several institutions in the area simply threw caution to the wind and ignored official regulations - the winter unlocking wasn't the complete free-for-all many in the media made it out to be, but creation of  "controlled environments" for which indoor dining and drinking would be tolerable. This clearly wasn't what happened in Belmullet, where maximum occupancy appears to have been ignored, and the Gardaí and operators appear to have had little ability to control the situation.

I'll suggest why this got no attention - because of the political optics of admitting that the issue was about the operational realities of the ill-fated winter unlock, rather than the overall idea. People simply ignored restrictions and breached them with impunity. Faced with mass confrontation in a normally by-consent policing model, owners and authorities didn't dare intervene. And the myth - for political reasons - that the unlock was a political own-goal in an otherwise strictly regulated and extended sequence of lockdowns, is preferable to the truth - that Paddy cannot be an adult or do what he's told unless he is strictly supervised.