GAVAN REILLY: Taoiseach, if you’re going to do interviews, please be consistent!

The obvious topic on which to write a column this week would be the holy show of Government communications last week. The perils of a weekly column, however - and the time that passes between me getting to write this page, and you getting to read it - mean it would even be nonsense to try and string a coherent complaint together.

Suffice to say: the Taoiseach told the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party that schools would reopen for the three youngest classes, then told a Limerick radio station it would be the four youngest, then went to a Cabinet sub-committee where this was supposed to be signed off on and … didn’t sign off on it… all in the space of 27 hours.

Suffice also to say: the Taoiseach told the Irish Mirror on Thursday afternoon that lockdown would (effectively) be extended until the end of April, then spent much of a tetchy doorstep the next day denying this meant a full level five lockdown until May, then then going on Raidió na Gaeltachta on Saturday and admitting that actually, yes, we are actually looking at level five until May… all in the space of 36 hours. (Oh, and by the way, also casually telling hundreds of thousands of people that their jobs in hospitality won’t return until mid-June at the earliest.)

Who knows - by the time this is printed, they may have decided that hairdressers won’t open until December, or retroactively declared that creches never actually closed at all.

Today (Tuesday) they’re publishing a revised ‘Living with Covid’ roadmap. Why bother, if we’re in lockdown until May anyway? The most plausible answer is that if we cannot socialise indoors until summertime, we must redesign society so that the first permitted events at which we can socialise again are outdoors and safe. Ironically, though, this explanation hasn’t come from the Taoiseach, or any politician at all - but rather from NPHET’s Philip Nolan, who actually has nothing to do in writing it.

Incidentally: we first heard about this new revised ‘Living with Covid’ plan when Leo Varadkar gave a separate press conference on pandemic economic supports two weeks ago.

Sources in Government Buildings say many in Cabinet knew nothing of these plans until Varadkar announced them to journalists. If you’re holding out for coherence in Government, you’ll need to hold out longer.

- Gavan Reilly is Political Correspondent for Virgin Media News and Political Columnist for the Meath Chronicle

- This article was first published on Tuesday 23rd in the print edition