Covid-19 is now a global problem in search of an Irish solution
Opinion: Businesses must prepare for lengthy period of restrictions and tightened border rules
A woman walks past the tent of a homeless person on Grafton Street in Dublin during lockdown. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA Wire
Things can change quickly in economics and commerce, but even those worlds rotate in slow motion compared to Planet Pandemic. Time after time, it has shown its ability to spin at warp speed with dizzying consequences, such as the human carnage wrought in Ireland over recent weeks following what was merely a brief Christmas interlude between lockdowns. Coronavirus is a Grinch.
This virus turns on its own plane and does what it wants, master of its world and ours. That is simultaneously awesome and dispiriting; the former because as humans we covet raw power and the virus has it in spades, the latter because we recognise that its power has, so far, outgunned ours.