Five years ago this week, the eyes of a locked-down nation turned to Galway. “Golfgate,” as it came to be known, stirred up national outrage. There was shock and fury at the flouting of Covid-19 restrictions by politicians and public figures. News bulletins were filled with questions: Who was in the room? Who sat beside whom? Who ate the dinner? The event ignited a firestorm—resignations were demanded, apologies made, careers dented temporarily. Even Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, became indirectly entangled.
It felt like a seismic moment. Our collective energy was consumed by this breach of the rules we were all trying to live by. The idea that a group could gather while funerals went unattended and elderly parents remained unvisited caused national dismay. Five years ago, these were the stories that exercised us.
And yet, how small it all seems now.
Since then, we have lived through a deepening darkness, a new reality. The war in Ukraine. The devastation in Gaza. The inhumanity of genocide. Cities flattened, families shattered, children silenced. It is not that our former concerns were invalid—it’s that the scale of what has followed dwarfs them completely. The daily fear and terror felt in Kyiv and Khan Younis, the images of mass graves and starving civilians—these now occupy our minds, displacing the petty with the profound.
Back then, we were preoccupied with how far we could walk or run. Whether a meal was “substantial” enough to justify a pint. Whether Christmas would still be Christmas. We judged harshly—those who traveled 5.5 kilometres instead of five, those who interpreted restrictions in their own favour, those who enforced them with what felt like hypocrisy. We were angry. We were scared. We were trying to hold onto a kind of order in a world that had tilted violently off-balance.
Each evening brought the daily death toll. To borrow from poet Rye Aker, every day felt like ‘a penance of Sundays’. Our cities emptied. The hush of lockdown resembled the silence of a forgotten prayer. What once passed for untidiness became rebranded as rewilding. What once felt busy became unnecessary. Nature moved in where we stepped out—birdsong replaced bus horns. We whispered to one another from a distance of two metres.
We don’t talk much about social distancing anymore, but have we really stopped doing it?
Many towns seized on the moment to reinvent themselves—work hubs sprung up where commuters once passed through. But those dreams proved fragile. As the real economy returned, the costs came back too. Businesses shuttered. Main streets quietened. Idleness outlasted isolation.
We were lulled into a suspended reality, one marked by silence and introspection. And then came the noise—the horrors of war, the cries of the displaced, the debates laced with venom and division. The end of polite discourse. The erosion of truth. The emergence of hatred given legitimacy by repetition.
The world we now live in seems not just five years but a million miles from the one that agonised over a dinner in Clifden. Back then, the breach of rules felt like a breach of trust. Now, trust itself feels like an endangered species. The global order that we assumed would protect the vulnerable has shown its cracks. We imagined international law as a safety net, but it is torn and frayed, unable—or unwilling—to catch the falling.
What exercises us now is survival, justice, peace. Not etiquette or compliance. Not who dined, or with whom.
And yet, maybe there’s a lesson in that. That what consumes us in the moment is rarely what will define us. That real perspective is a long game—earned not in press releases or scandals, but in who we choose to be when the world shows us its worst.
