Stop Panicking: stop panic buying, and stop stockpiling food!

Stop Panicking: stop panic buying, and stop stockpiling food!

To anyone who, before now, didn’t fully understand the concept of “the tragedy of the commons”, look around you to what is happening in Ireland during the spread of Covid-19, which the World Health Organisation has recently classified as a pandemic.


It sounds scary when something is classified with a word as powerful as “pandemic”. Add a tense movie-thriller-sounding qualifying word to pandemic, such as Covid-19, and there is plenty of reason to let your thoughts disappear down a movie script dystopian style rabbit hole of horror scenarios.

The irony of the situation is that the only horror that is likely to occur form panic-driven stockpiling of food and (bizarrely) toiletries will be to the old, sick and vulnerable in society, who are the ones that we must surely try our hardest to protect. They are after all the ones most likely to suffer most during the pandemic.

A letter to The Irish Times: Christmas Day Forty Foot Swim

Dismayed by the junk left floating in the Forty Foot during the Christmas Day swim this year, I wrote to the Irish Times and they published my murmurings: 

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/forty-foot-swim-1.3742263

"Sir, – The freezing festive cheer, the meeting of old friends, and the banter shared over hot drinks at the Forty Foot in Dublin on Christmas Day are pure magic. It was thronged like no previous year. Quickly in and quickly out. Yelps and screams abounded, and shared icy pain and laughter were the order of the day.

Only the brave go back for seconds, which is unfortunate given the amount of Christmas hats, fake antlers, bobbles and other junk left floating in the sea afterwards. – Yours, etc,

NICK DORAN,"