A lot of judgement floating around the unfortunate scenes in Kilkee, reserved for both the young people and for their parents.

Perspective and nuance is needed on this, because judgement rarely produces anything beneficial.

Young people have been wonderful in Ireland.

In the last 5 months, how many videos have you seen of 300 young Irish people getting hammered on a beach?

If it's not zero, it's very close to zero.

Teenagers and their parents have been overwhelmingly great during the pandemic and that should be acknowledged.

1.6 million people in Ireland are under the age of 24-years-old, with 600,000 of them between 15-24.

Those 1.6 million kids, teenagers and young adults were a vital part of smashing the curve down to levels where we are now seeing 1 death notified per week.

Legends.

If those scenes in Kilkee represented typical behaviour in that age group, we wouldn't have spent the whole of July massively outperforming the EU in terms of infection.

We were consistently 2 to 4 times below the EU/EEA 14 day incidence average throughout July.

We still are.

It's easy to be distracted by shiny objects but the vast majority of that age group in Ireland were not spotted on the lash in massive groups at the weekend.

Most of the 599,700 not in that video were either sat at home or having a responsible piss-up in small groups.

You have to counter-weigh that defence of 99% of young people by noting 1% of 600,000 is still 6,000 people.

House parties, garden parties, beach parties in big numbers, involving alcohol, rapidly increases the complexity of the task for contact tracers.

Creates a big problem.

There was a lot of misguided focus on a small number of American tourists who made the trip, but the reality was always a lot simpler:

It's the behaviour of Irish society that determines the trajectory of our pandemic.

These type of scenes can lead us into some bad places.

I've kept close track on house party clusters in other countries in recent weeks, with news alerts and other updates.

They lead nowhere good.

There's still struggling to completely get on top of party clusters in Cordoba, Valencia, Zurich, Lisbon to name a few.

Parents haven't had a doddle of a time past 5 months.

No school, maybe no work, no visiting parents, no outlet for a social life or any semblance of normality - it's a pressure valve.

Any judgement of parents is misguided. They did great - with a depleted support network.

As for kids...

Consider 6th years.

No Leaving, no Graduation mass, no Grad night out, no results night out, no Debs, no inter-railing, no J1, no driving lessons, no driving tests.

For many people, those are some of the fondest memories of their life.

All gone for those kids.

For us to have so few of those Kilkee type scenes since February is a testament to the caliber of young people and parents we have in Ireland.

That we eventually saw those scenes is understandable, bordering on inevitable.

That they can't be repeated again is obvious.

Instead of vilifying young people or parents, we need to praise them and reinforce the message that Covid19 isn't gone.

We need a sustained effort throughout the winter to limit parties to fewer numbers because it's far too difficult to contain large house party clusters.

The biggest misnomer of the pandemic was the suggestion the first line of defence for nursing homes is PPE.

The first and preeminent line of defence is Irish society - because if community transmission is low, there is little virus to get into nursing homes to begin with.

If we keep seeing these party scenes, we will lose track of the virus and it will indirectly cause problems for older people.

You can imagine the complexity of getting the 300 names at that Kilkee gathering, each of whom may have had 10 other close contacts.

Any parent reading this, thank you and try sustain the good work.

Any young adult or teenager, thank you and just keep the piss-ups to 5-10 people you can name for now, can still have a decent night and it's safer for everyone.

Less pointing fingers, more washing hands.