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IRELAND’S FIRST OPENLY gay cabinet minister, Leo Varadkar has described how, “it is definitely a lot harder to stay in than to come out”.
Speaking on RTÉ’s The Ray D’Arcy Show this afternoon in the same studio where he came out publicly as gay back in January, he said that doing so had benefited his life.
When asked whether he had noticed any change in the way that people interacted with him, he said, “If anything people are probably a bit warmer in the sense that when you expose your vulnerabilities to the world in the way that I did, people feel that they know you a bit better than they did before.”
Prior to the January interview, he described how he had experienced, “irrational anxieties about how your life is going to change, and it doesn’t really. At least it didn’t for me.
‘A quiet time in the news cycle’
Speaking about the January radio interview, the Fine Gael Minister said that he had wanted to come out at “a quiet time in the news cycle”, saying, “well you know what people are like politics. People would accuse you of trying to change the media agenda by talking about yourself.”
On the result of the same-sex marriage referendum, he said that he felt that, “the best thing for most people was the fact that the result was clear across the country. I thought it would pass, I always did think it would. But I thought it might have been Dublin and the east coast pulling the rest of the country along.”
The fact that we were sort of winning in Mayo and Donegal and west Cork and west Limerick and even some smaller market towns getting 60 or 70 per cent of the vote said a lot about the country. Said something very good about the country.
Plans for the health service
The interview then went on to cover Varadkar’s ongoing time in the Department of Health.
On this, he said, “If you look back at the last couple of health ministers, none of them solved all the problems, I don’t think I can do that. But they can all point to big things they did that really made a difference.”
He cited the work-place smoking ban introduced by Micheál Martin; the cancer strategy introduced by Mary Harney and an expansion of screenings introduced by James Reilly as areas where former Ministers had been successful.
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If the health officials have their way and make social distancing a condition for businesses to reopen our economy will never recover. This is absolute nonsense. The so called cure will be far far worse than the disease.
Face masks, physical distancing and things can start resuming. I can’t understand why people are willing to believe that we are all stupid paddies who need to be locked up otherwise we wouldn’t be able to control ourselves. The vast majority of people are highly responsible. However, when you see the guards allowing the gemmaroids to travel and congregate you would wonder. We know what to do to avoid infection. Other countries are doing it successfully and are opening up at a quicker rate than us. What terrifies me is the aftermath . We’ve had practically no healthcare apart from covid in the country for nearly 2 months. Mental health issues have been pushed under the carpet. People experiencing violence and abuse from partners, parents, children have had nowhere to escape to. The economic fall out will be horrendous. Many businesses will never reopen. Unemployment will rocket. Amazon will keep trading with their warehouses full of staff working round the clock in dubious conditions, yet the local hairdresser with only one chair can’t open up until August. But, at least from the 18th we can get to the garden centre for some lettuce seeds to sustain us over the summer months. the worst is yet to come
@Anne Marie Devlin: precisely . The lockdown was necessary for two months and then phased out but the exit plan is far too long and the economic recession & health consequences will be disastrous . Already FG ligned up with Holland and co against the mutualisation of EU debt and is defending loans instead – 2011 revisited.
Mandatory Masks in public closed places, quick laboratory test results & contact tracing, isolating positive cases & their contacts & PPE for essential workers would allow a quicker exit plan. It’s inconceivable that bus passengers are still wearing no masks as I saw yesterday as I had to go into office & the GoD irresponsible were out in quays again bundled together watched by the poor guards with no PPE ( look at outbreak in mountjoy station today ) .
Testing alone is useless.
We have known for months that we need effective and quick contact tracing leading to identification and self isolation of infected people.
Where are the contact tracing metrics?
WTF is wrong that journalists and politicians keep forgetting that we need to do more than hide behind the couch to deal with this killer.
Keep the vulnerable away from sources of infection
Quickly track down infected people
Get the healthy ones to self isolate
Bring the sick ones to hospital
Live our lives
Here read this: https://www.fda.gov/media/136472/download
And understand it, and in particular pay attention to page 3: “Negative results do not preclude SARS-CoV-2 infection and should not be used as the sole basis for patient management decisions. Negative results must be combined with clinical observations, patient history, and epidemiological information.” Similar conditions of course apply to positive results. It is a hugely complicated test to be used on symptomatic patients. So bear this information in mind next time you see an uninformed journalist or a politician suggesting that this test can be used to certify people as safe to travel or to test the entire population etc. I won’t waste time or energy on getting into further discussions about why I share this or about who is right. Just read the info I give you here, and make up your own minds.
They’ve upgraded from vista to XP
“THE BROADENING OF testing criteria for Covid-19 has raised questions about whether Ireland could once again face a major backlog.”
Where in the article does it mention these ‘raised questions’ – the GPs said they’re confident with the testing process now, the article doesn’t mention anyone else with ‘questions’?
have your say