“Where I live in Strandhill, there’s so many bollards on the seafront, I’d say had the Nazis done it in France on D-Day, God knows what the outcome of the war would have been”.
Fianna Fáil TD Marc MacSharry has criticised councils across Ireland for closing amenities after the public was told to have an outdoor summer.
Speaking in the Dáil on Wednesday, the TD called on councils to “give people the summer that they deserve”.
MacSharry said: “We’re talking as if the recovery has begun, that society is open. Society is most certainly not open. We have a level of paranoia and scaremongering that is not consistent with either the numbers in hospital or the daily numbers.”
The TD was speaking after Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dr Tony Holohan tweeted at the weekend that he was “absolutely shocked” at the “enormous crowds” gathered in the South William Street area of Dublin’s city centre at around 8.15pm on Saturday evening.
The CMO on Wednesday described the large gatherings on Saturday as looking like “Jones’ Road on a day of an All-Ireland.”
Meanwhile, Dublin park St. Stephen’s Green’s popular Victorian Bandstand has been fenced off by the Office of Public Works (OPW).
The OPW told JOE: “We want visitors to enjoy the Green but OPW must also protect vulnerable historic features from vandalism and anti-social behaviour. In order to protect the historic bandstand from any further damage, a decision was taken to erect fencing to protect the structure.”
Commenting on the two events, MacSharry told the Dáil: “We had the CMO tweeting over the course of the weekend his outrage at seeing people out doing what we told them to do – have an outdoor summer.
“You can have a takeaway pint or a Coca-Cola but don’t congregate on the canal because the Gardaí are going to come along and throw it out. Where do we expect people to go?
“As we speak, over in Stephen’s Green, we are fencing off the bandstands because the last thing we want is people to congregate there.”
MacSharry added that councils closing off amenities is also happening outside of Dublin, citing the Spanish Arch in Galway and Strandhill in Sligo.
He said: “You can’t have it both ways… and this is replicated all over the country – Spanish Arch. Where I live in Strandhill, there’s so many bollards on the seafront, I’d say had the Nazis done it in France on D-Day, God knows what the outcome of the war would have been.”
MacSharry stated that there is “no evidence” to suggest that congregations of recent weeks have led to a spike in numbers.
He said: “We need alignment… Let’s give people the summer that they deserve and then we might have the beginning of a recovery.”
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