Tag Archives: George Lee

George Lee

Earlier today on RTÉ’s News at One.

RTE’s Science Correspondent George Lee spoke to Áine Lawlor about the new Covid-19 restrictions for Dublin.

During the interview, they had this exchange about “public buy-in”.

Warning: contains smugness, scolding and startling indifference to human suffering.

Áine Lawlor: “If this is your livelihood, if you have restocked your pub a couple of times, you know, in the hope that finally the restrictions were going to be lifted and you could go back to trying to earn a crust and suddenly again you’re told you can’t.”

George Lee: ‘But I do honestly wonder, Aine, when I hear stuff like that, these people aren’t living on the blooming moon, you know.

“They know how we have been since March. They have a particular position and they’re all in pain economically and socially because of it like us all and, unfortunately because of the sectors they’re in, they’re in a sector where you do have transmission, they know that. So …and they don’t want it to happen but they do see, as you say, I suppose, exemptions being made for some areas and they’re wondering why.

“Well I’ll give you an example now today. Professor Philip Nolan is picking up on this argument and I’m very struck by the fact that people from NPHET now have to do this. They’re engaging, basically trying to explain the arguments that the people who are lobbying politically are putting to politicians.”

Lawlor: “But it is important, this as well, isn’t it, George, because however often it has to be explained. If you are asking people to live in the new normal…”

Lee: “You have to explain it…you must explain it.”

Lawlor: “If you are asking people to live with new restrictions and if you are asking people to accept that their livelihood has gone out the window, they need to understand why.”

Lee: “One hundred per cent. But we have been, what people have been explaining it now since March. So…”

Lawlor: “Explain it again though. What’s Philip Nolan saying?”

Lee: “I do, people do understand, I think people complain.”

Lawlor: “What’s Philip Nolan saying?”

Lee: “What he’s saying is, look, this whole issue of talking about closing restaurants and pubs, why do we have to do it when there are so few outbreaks in those areas. He said people are making those arguments, he says, on behalf of NPHET basically, they’re misreading and misinterpreting the data about outbreaks.

“What he’s says is that when you effectively, if you are out in a restaurant and you are with a group and you pick up the virus, the virus grows within you, invisibly for three days, for the next few days you begin to shed the virus and you develop symptoms and you go for a test.

“Now the testing thing is so, remember what they’re trying to do, they’re trying to stop the spread of the virus, so they’re trying to get ahead of it. Who have you met in the last 48 hours? Where is it going to break out next? They’re concentrating on that. They’re not going back five days, they’re not going back and saying ‘were you in a restaurant, or were you in a pub or somewhere, or a hotel five days ago?

“And so when you look at the data, in that case, that individual, he said, will turn out to be a community-acquired infection and his household, who picked it up are now a household infection. So you see all the numbers which are saying ‘oh you have a huge increase’ in most of the cases and clusters are in households.

They don’t say where did the household actually originally get it because nobody really knows. And what he’s saying is all of the evidence suggests that it’s coming from wherever people are socially interacting up to five days beforehand. And he said that turns out to be pubs, restaurants and all of those other things like gyms and so on.

“And he said, so to say that there’s no outbreaks in pubs and restaurants, or those places, obviously not in pubs, we haven’t had the wet pubs open, he said that is misreading the data. It’s not saying that that’s not where it happens and that’s why he says that it’s so important to close down those social interactions.”

Blimey.

The masks just keep slipping,

Listen back here

Lee

“The deterioration in the position of under 25s in our labour force has been particularly severe. The numbers of them with jobs has fallen by 60% since the start of this recession. That is worse than any other category by far. And this document from the OECD in September says the reason the Government has cut their dole payments is to save money and to make parents more responsible for supporting their unemployed children now up to the age of 26. Which is all well and good, if the parents have money. But in thousands and thousands of cases that is not the case. And having little, or no money, puts you at a very big disadvantage when it comes to searching for jobs.”

RTÉ’s George Lee on Prime Time last night responding to the recent Budget decision to extend the lower dole rate of €100 dole rate to new entrants aged under 25 from next January.

They will get a reduced rate of €144 while those aged 26 will receive the full jobseekers’ allowance of €188.

Miriam O’Callaghan then spoke to Labour TD John Lyons; Moira Murphy, from the We’re Not Leaving campaign; Professor Alan Barrett, of the ESRI and Cllr Hugh Lewis, from People Before Profit.

BarrettDuring the debate, Ms O’Callaghan put it to Prof Barrett, above, that the dole cut was brought in as an incentive to make young people find work.

She asked him: “Will it work? If there’s no jobs out there, will it work?”

Prof Barrett replied: “No, probably not.”

He explained:

“The youth unemployment crisis, we can call it that, but it’s still just the economic crisis. Ok? It is still fundamentally the problem that we don’t have enough jobs to go around and like that, ultimately what we need to do is get the economy starting to move and when that happens the hope will be that jobs start to come around and that young people will be in a position to get those jobs. What happens, having said that, is I think one of the great, great fears and worries that we have is that we know the longer people are out of work, the more difficult it is for them to get back into work. So we have at the moment, we have this current problem of youth unemployment but where we’re really worried about it is that, even if things turn around, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people are going to get, that they’re going to plug back in seamlessly. And what we also know is that even if people get jobs one of the worst things about sort of entering the labour market at the time of a recession is that it can actually affect you for the rest of your career. It’s the scarring effect. It’s not necessarily the case that you’re going to jump back to where you otherwise would have been. You can now spend the entire of your life behind where you otherwise would have been and this is why we worry about youth unemployment. I mean there’s middle-aged unemployment, there’s elderly unemployment but there’s a specific worry about youth unemployment because it can affect people essentially for the rest of their lives.”

Watch here.