Irish Gov't: Not Wearing a Mask ‘Akin To Workplace Assault'

Patrick Taylor | June 29, 2022
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The Irish government is no stranger to malarkey or shenanigans, but their latest take on COVID-19 regulations may be their most absurd yet.

On Monday, Ireland’s Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) upheld the dismissal of an employee at a refugee asylum center operated by Tattonward Ltd who did not comply with the company’s new COVID-19 procedures.

Tattonward was reportedly angered that the employee, Siarhei Klimasheuski, “was not wiping down door handles with sanitiser,” and “‘waved his hand and shrugged’ when [another employee] asked him to get residents to use hand sanitiser.”

The final straw, apparently, was an incident in which Klimasheuski “failed to manage the numbers in the canteen and was not wearing either a mask or a plastic apron.”

Adjudicating officer Emile Daly was none too pleased with the employee’s actions, though she conceded that there had been “a considerable number of significant defects in the dismissal process.”

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“Any one of these failures to act could have resulted in the transmission of the virus within the [center],” she wrote, “I am satisfied that these actions were acts of gross misconduct akin to a workplace assault on a colleague or resident, because in a way that is exactly what it was.”

This claim truly reveals the extent to which bureaucracy has been overtaken by the neuroses of out-of-touch Covidians. To anyone not living in fear of a disease with a survival rate conservatively estimated to be in the high 90s, the idea that not wearing a mask is anything close to a “workplace assault” is preposterous.

As amusing as Daly’s hysteria may be from afar, the actions of similar bureaucrats during the COVID-19 pandemic have been nothing short of authoritarian. From the longest lockdown in Europe to a vaccine passport scheme, Irish politicians and liberal bureaucrats have ruled with an iron fist in enforcing COVID-19 laws.

This crackdown on normal life is a far cry from what has historically made Ireland great. To the dismay of countless people of Irish heritage — myself included — the liberalization of the Emerald Isle marches on.

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