The answer to the above question for many of us would be “Hell yeah. Bring it on...bring...it....on.”
Bring on the freedom, the newfound appreciation of all that we have missed. The liberation to walk into a cafe and order a coffee and sit down at a table and take out a book.
Or the elimination of the fear to meet friends for a meal or a chat. Or to take the teams out for training again. To allow them all to tear into each other without fear of excessive contact. To be able to shake a hand, to pat a back, to show solidarity and welcome.
There is a story in our business pages this week about how property prices in cities and regions like Galway will be impacted by the flock from the capital of people whose working lives have been altered by Covid. Much has been said about the abandonment of cities by thousands of people flocking to their own towns and villages for remote working, and much of that will happen.
This is a good thing because it will invigorate local places. The tremendous work of groups like Grow Remote led by Kinvara’s Tracy Keough is just one example of the benefit it will spread in terms of vitality, but also to prosperity and the quality of family life. But remember too that many workers simply cannot transfer their jobs to their homes, especially those in hospitality and tourism.
There will be changes in our cities, but not necessarily changes in numbers of people, but more a changing of priorities for people. What they want to do, when they want to work, how they want to eat, how hygienic they want their place to be. And these are all changes that our city planners will have to implement as they set out facilitating the post-Covid age. Will we continue with squeezing cars down narrow medieval streets and forcing us all to squash together on metre-wide footpaths? Will we continue with encouraging the indoor-isation of our dining industry by preventing an overspill onto the space outside.
So much was deemed impossible or impractical this time last year. No, you can’t work from home because sure you’ll be dossing and watching Netflix. No, you can’t put a table outside because someone will fall over it. And all of those concerns are valid too, but the impact of Covid must surely result in a more reasoned approach being taken to the work-life balance, the importance of health and hygiene, and the tolerance for behaviours that might place all of this in peril.
As humans we need the interaction that has been lacking for the last year. As we climb up towards the first anniversary of the only big lockdown that many of us have experienced in our lives, there will be no doubt implications at the enormity of the time just passed. But rather than seeing it as a year gone, see it as a year where we as humans showed just how adaptable we are to the most confining of situations.
But that does not apply to us all. At this week’s Galway County Council Policing Committee meeting, we were told of the increase in the number of domestic violence related incidents that Gardai were called to. And that this might be just the tip of the iceberg. Remember too that there have been many children who have gone hungry and neglected because they were outside the remit of the schools and institutions that might otherwise monitor their situations.
If God forbid, there is to be a new pandemic in a few years time, the world will rect to it in a very different way that this one. We will develop systems and processes whereby we can retreat into our shell for as long as it takes, but hopefully without as much psychological and physical impact as this one.
For now, we must move back towards a new normal with one eye on how we can live our lives with our newfound freedoms and responsibilities.
