A music festival with crowds packed tightly and not a mask to be seen. A rugby match under floodlights, the stands full of people, the atmosphere palpable. Friends gathering in cafés, happy smiles, shopping bags at their feet.
But it is even harder again for those in opposition. In this crazy business, the worst and potentially fatal thing is to be ignored. It’s all well and good urging political “green jerseys” all round for the common good. Opposition politicians just automatically agreeing with Government risk sinking from view like a stone – but too-harsh criticisms appear cheap.
Ms McDonald, as well as being leader of Sinn Féin, is leader of the opposition. Hark at what a previous holder of that job – one John Bruton of Fine Gael – had to say about the post.
“Being leader of the opposition is by some distance the hardest job in politics,” Mr Bruton said just last year. He recalled internal pressure from colleagues to always oppose – and public pressure not to be negative.
Even though it has been the dominant, almost singular, political issue for the best part of a year now, Covid-19 has rarely been a polarising one, writes Mary Regan.
Richard Boyd Barrett considers himself one of the fortunate. Born at a mother and baby home in 1967, he was adopted into a loving family and was later reunited with his birth mother, actress Sinéad Cusack. Undoubtedly, I am one of the lucky ones. I was adopted by a wonderful family. And then subsequently I was reunited with my biological family. My mother came and found me. Changes in the law allowed her to do that. And since then, I have met brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles that I had never known. So I am incredibly lucky, he tells the Sunday Independent.
Labour TD Seán Sherlock spoke about, Dr James Deeny Chief Medical Adviser of the Republic of Ireland, who worked in the Bessborough mother and baby home.
He got choked up as he spoke about a report where the children were described as “miserable scraps of humanity, wisened and emancipated and almost all had rashes and sores all over their bodies, hands and heads”.
“Forgive me for getting upset, Leas Ceann Comhairle, that has to be dealt with, we have to deal with it face on,” he told the Dáil.
Fine Gael TD Jennifer Carrol MacNeill also had to hold back tears as she spoke about the “animalistic” scream that came from a mother who had found out that her baby had been taken away from the home for adoption without notice or consent.