Younger generation will pay a high price from Covid-19

The more this Covid-19 crisis goes on the more I feel like screaming. Where are we going with this lockdown, what exactly are we trying to achieve? According to the Central Statistics Office, life expectancy in Ireland pre-Covid was 82 years (80 for men, 84 for women). The daily figures from the HSE suggest that the median death age in this country from the disease is 82 years too, so no change there, effectively. All the focus is on this virus at the expense of other life-threatening illnesses. Is a life lost to cancer for example any less important than a life lost to Covid-19? Meanwhile, the most recent monthly jobless figures show that youth (15-24 age group) unemployment was 53% in April, yet these people are not at serious health risk from the virus, medical practitioners say. Then if so, why are they not allowed to go back to work straight away? Maybe the ultimate goal is to destroy the economy, have as few people working as possible, give “generous and unaffordable to the taxpayer” infinite social welfare benefits out to the rest, and borrow on the financial markets at ultra-low interest rates until the cows come home. Dream on.

The vast majority of people in Ireland work in the private, not the public sector. Yet here we are, the economy and livelihoods destroyed by decisions made by a group of public servants, all in safe and pensionable jobs. I wonder if their jobs, wages, research funding et cetera came under threat would they be as rigid on how far we should be social distancing and how long (longer than anywhere else in Europe it seems) the economy should be closed down for. Everything in life is a risk, so let’s get this idea of zero-risk out of our heads straight away. It simply doesn’t exist. And as for this nonsense of the “new normal”. That doesn’t even make sense. We had a normal existence, now that is gone, so we now have a new existence, but it is not normal, and it never can be described as such.

Initially, I think it helped us that the Taoiseach was from a medical background, but as things have progressed, and the economic crisis has overtaken the Covid-19 risk, I’m now not so sure. We need someone with common sense and good business acumen to at this juncture be calling the shots and to lead. Unfortunately for Leo Varadkar, he has never received the mandate from the country to lead, and that may well be influencing the choices he is making. Essentially, he is being ultra-cautious. When one mentions the names Trump, Merkel, Thatcher, Haughey, we can immediately think of their divisive nature. Yet they are/were strong leaders who could make and take risky decisions, irrespective of the personal consequences for themselves.

If moving the social distancing limit from two metres to one can make a huge difference to the viability of businesses, particularly in the food and drinks industry, then politicians need to start earning their corn and stop abdicating their responsibility to public servants for every decision under the sun. We probably have limited the overall health damage from Covid-19 through the lockdown and social distancing, but we may have done irreparable damage to the economy, and indeed to our younger generation, who will ultimately bear the cost of this crisis, in financial and very possibly health terms, long after many of those who they are now being asked to save, have left this world.

Young people in their twenties have already this century had to endure the global financial crisis, Brexit and now Covid-19. Those of them who live long enough will in my view probably see the shifting in power away from the West to the East, with China overtaking the US as the world’s biggest and most important economy. More worryingly though for Ireland, they are also likely to see the breakup of the EU. The latter is only a matter of time in my opinion and something that will have huge consequences for the Irish economy, potentially greater than the threats we have already seen this century. For many of the younger generation, the fun is only beginning, and not necessarily in a good way. Therefore, we need to help them the best we can, and sooner rather than later. The greatest threat to them may not be Covid-19 but no future job prospects, an endless debt burden both personal and government, and a bleak economic landscape. We owe it to our children to remove the locks and chains and set them free and out into the world again. Apart from the number of older people who have died from the virus the other key legacy of this crisis may be the long-lasting damage both socio and economic caused to the younger generation.