NPHET propose to ban kids birthday parties….

So, with the worrying surge in cases NPHET, they to whom the government have ceded decision making, have decided that kids parties are the problem. Yep. Holymudderagod…. The surge in cases is down to direct provision center/poor paid workers in gross overcrowding and THIS is their latest hamfisted cackhanded (can you be both? I guess) response

In their latest proposal they suggest (thankfully this seems to be getting FINALLY some pushback from our elected ministers)

” only six people should be permitted in a home from three separate houses in a bid to clamp down on house parties and outdoor home gathering should be reduced to 15 people.”

So. A kids birthyparty, students in a shared flat, an extended family sunday lunch, six close friends having a evening watching a movie, a card club, a meeting of the residents association committee, a quilting group, a coderdogo, a mens shed, these are in NPHET-land the same as a house party as conventionally assumed. God they must have been at some deadly dull parties. And, what is a home? By the strict letter here I could rent a warehouse and crank up the volume….Its not a home, is it? And why 15 outdoors? Why not 12, or 20, or 5? Again we see delphic utterances devoid of scientific reasoning or social rationale.

Notably, NPHET did not call for an immediate ban on

• Poorly supervised crowded workplaces
• coliving developments
• rackrenting landlords crowding 40 persons into a house (wait, did they? is 40>6? could we see AGS enforcing this law with baillifs wearing the Cote d’Ivoire flag as we saw elsewhere)
• Direct provision centers where “Self isolation” means a curtain around one side of the bed in a room you share with 5 others.

We know what will happen. Most people will roll their eyes and try to continue to act as sensibly as possible. People who want to have house parties, as opposed to parties in their houses, will continue to do so. AGS will do SFA about these until the bodies are literally falling out windows onto the grass, while little Felix three doors down wonders why his birthday party is cancelled. And NPHET will sail on blithly, unchallenged and aloof, demanding we accept their arguments from authority.

As the piece in the Independent notes, we have at this stage gotten totally out of kilter with the rest of Europe. This is because we have no plan, other than to bumble on. We have no definition of what partial or full success means. We have a government which has abdicated its primary democratic responsibility – to make decisions and to be held accountable for them – to a tecnocratic body which while doing its job as best it can cannot and should not be allowed to have the power which it has accreted.