Una Mullally: Government failing to lead us through pandemic

I was queuing outside a shop at the weekend when I heard a fellow customer chatting with their friend and declaring “I’m sick of life.” While resisting the urge to offer them a hug – something social distancing doesn’t allow for in the current context – the remark does sum up an element of the broad national feeling at the moment.

The ideal outcome of a pandemic is that you survive, that you stay alive during a period where so many have died, and there is an immense privilege to feeling “bored”, “sick of it all” and “over it”. If you are feeling any or all of these things right now, then congratulations, you are alive.

So what next? Frustration, anger, irritability and feeling rudderless is permeating the national psyche. This context of helplessness is so dominant that even the extreme situation in our hospitals and nursing homes and the horror of the daily death toll appears not to feel shocking anymore but flattening. It is a privilege to feel flattened. That is a much more preferable feeling than the one of extreme grief many people are experiencing right now. But this feeling of resignation is also coming from the top.

By asking a Government incapable of inspiring to inspire, we're only going to be left standing at an empty well, bucket swinging

Leadership isn’t just about commanding, it’s about bringing people with you. The Government has lost its capacity for both, particularly the necessary need to bring people together, because of their terrible populist decision to blindly “open things back up” in December, and in an attempt to shirk responsibility or blame, retrospectively obfuscate around that decision by distorting what the facts of advice from Nphet were.

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Flailing, faltering, and failing

And now, there’s a sense that when it comes to leading us as a collective Government is flailing, faltering, and failing. It’s a remarkably serious situation both in terms of national mental and emotional health.

Will we fracture and fall to pieces, or will we galvanise and conjure a sense of hope?

Plenty of the emotional transference or displacement of frustrations on to the political sphere is valid. Whether it’s outrage about the gaffe-prone Prince Philip of Cabinet, Josepha Madigan putting her foot in her mouth again, or Stephen Donnelly letting his own frustrations spill over with an astonishingly immature, arrogant, foul-mouthed finger-pointing exchange of his own making in the Dáil, our current crop of “leaders” don’t exactly inspire confidence.

Meanwhile, the Greens for the most part, are continuing their oneness with nature by hibernating. We know that our leadership is inadequate, and so by asking a Government incapable of inspiring to inspire, we’re only going to be left standing at an empty well, bucket swinging.

But we are all in a pandemic, and our politicians are not immune to the national meltdown. That’s not to say the Government shouldn’t be held accountable for not reaching basic standards, but I wonder how much all this lashing out is actually helping us.

If you feel ground down, that is also a symptom of how you’ve adapted. If this lockdown isn’t offering you the personal revelations that the first lockdown did, then that’s because you’re used to it.

If you’re only realising or feeling the impact of bad government decisions now, then you were probably protected from them before, which is another indication of privilege.

If the low-level depression is only creeping in now – welcome to the club. It’s as though the lack of pleasure in daily life has short-circuited our brain’s reward system. The dopamine isn’t flowing, and tasks that used to give us pleasure – cooking, going for walks – have been repeated so often their impact has depleted.

There have been times in this month of Mondays, where so devoid of social interaction, I’ve almost lost a sense of who I am, and have realised how much of one’s sense of self is reinforced by the recognition that relationships offer.

That feels like a dramatic and almost worrying thing to articulate, but the grip on what my pre-pandemic life was actually like has sometimes loosened to the point of discombobulation.

There’s something of a collective ego death occurring, which is weird and scary, but can also be framed as a step preceding rebirth and rediscovery of the self.

Maybe this is where we at, something that also chimes with a new in-tune feeling with the seasons. This moment that we’re in is right before Imbolc and the beginning of spring, a time of regrowth and renewal.

Okay to find things hard

It’s okay to find things hard right now. But it is temporary, even if it feels like we’re stuck in a loop. The reality is, if people in Government were able to do better, they would. But all of us can do better and provide support for each other, and make choices about whether we dump our rage on social media for others to contend with, or go within more deeply to summon what resources we have, however depleted.

This hardship does not exist for hardship’s sake. We are in training for whatever comes next and every moment is not just a grinding one, but a process of building resilience.

Something tells me if that’s what’s happening now – the grind as resilience-building – we’re going to need it. If the twists in the road so far have taught us anything, it’s that there are probably more to come.