Be clear that most people are doing their best and when they test positive, have very few close contacts.

A handful at most.

A small minority test positive & have a lot of close contacts.

Some over 50.

Issue is a tiny minority of 5 million people is still a lot of people:

There's rarely a good reason to have 50 close contacts.

That usually signifies one or more of the following situations:

-Went to a house party
-Went to the pub, a birthday party, wedding in same week.
-Social butterfly with an enormous amount of friends

When you look at some of the settings that people associate with bad political policy:

-Meat plants
-DP

Both of those settings combined accounted for < 1% of all cases over the past 4 weeks.

99% of cases occurred elsewhere.

The issues with meat plants (lack of sick pay) and DP (abolishing the practice entirely) are their own worthy issues worth fighting for but they are not the problem we face.

The problem we face is people choosing to socialize in pre-pandemic ways in pandemic times.

Unless we can convince a minority of people to knock it off, this won't get better.

That problem can't be solved by Levels or the Government or Gardai.

None of them can watch your house to see if 20 teenagers are hanging out or a 40-year-old has a birthday bash with 25 people.

The evidence re: schools is crystal clear in Ireland and Europe that they are not driving the spread.

You only have to take one look at the infection rate in those age groups and the rarity of large clusters to know closing them would do next-to-nothing to improve things.

The things Govt can and should do:

-Help medical scientists with more resources including pay rise.

-Help Public Health teams with more resources including pay rise.

-Close all pubs (that's my opinion, you're free to disagree).

None of those steps would get us out from under this though because the primary transmission is happening in peoples houses and social gatherings.

That's a choice for us all and this isn't just young people, it's late 20's 30's, 40's also.

Easiest thing in the world to do is point fingers of blame, which is not what I ever do.

A 30-year-old slipping up with a house party is 100% understandable, as is a campus party.

What needs to happen is education of how dire this situation is and encouragement to do better.

And this is worth reminding people, too:

This pandemic is sweeping across Western Europe.

Ireland still has the lowest infection rate of all our neighbours, by a mile.

Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, England, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, France are all doing far worse.

It's very easy to get angry and think we must be doing something wrong as a society.

We aren't.

This is a highly transmissible virus and we are holding out best in our part of Europe and outperforming the reality seen on the ground all around us.

Look to Dublin for inspiration.

They were level with Belfast on the same rate of growth 3 weeks ago but managed to hold firm through the collective effort of wonderful people.

We can do the same nationally.

Stick together and make good decisions for your family every day.