Spare a thought for holidaymakers in Ireland – we face a social media shaming if we dare leave the country

At the moment, living in Ireland feels a lot like being forced to stay in the classroom at break time, while everyone else skips around the playground. Half of my Instagram feed has decamped to Santorini, but it looks like I’m stuck here for the foreseeable future, my passport gathering dust in a drawer.

Back in July, after weeks of delays and procrastination, the Irish green list was announced, followed swiftly by a wave of confusion. It featured a rag-tag collection of 15 countries, some of which we couldn’t even reach without flying through a “banned” destination, or travelling on a non-existent cruise ship (here’s looking at you, Greenland).

That list has since been reduced to just 10 countries, including Italy, Greece and Slovakia. This should be welcome news – after all, we finally have a list of countries to which we can travel, and I sure as hell wouldn’t say no to a few nights in Ischia, or a week of island-hopping in Greece.

But unfortunately, that isn’t the case. Even with this green list in place, the overriding message from our government is that non-essential travel is still off the table – if we want a holiday, then we have to do it at home. To watch the rest of the world travel while we cannot is unendingly frustrating, particularly when other countries now have lower case rates than ours.

As a travel writer based in Ireland, I spend a lot of my working life waxing lyrical about how damn beautiful the place is, and encouraging visitors to come over and see it for themselves. I know that there are far worse places to see out a pandemic – as soon as our lockdown ended I shot out to the North West, so I could climb the mountains in Sligo and eat lobster plucked from the sea just a few hours before. In July, I pitched up on the uninhabited islands of Inishkea in County Mayo, where the sands were so blindingly white the beach could have easily passed for a Caribbean shore (were it not for the windswept sheep grazing on the edge of the dunes).

But as great as Ireland is, we desperately need the world to open up once again. And it’s not just about tropical beaches, balmy cities or the joy of an ice-cold local beer as the sun starts to set. The place I really want to go is just an hour’s flight away, but cruelly out of reach.

I’m originally from Sussex, and haven’t been home since February. I know I’m far from alone – hundreds of thousands of Irish people live in the UK, and have been unable to see their loved ones since all of this madness began. I can, technically, go home – there would be no quarantine after landing in England from Ireland, after all. But I would have to self-isolate or “restrict my movements” for 14 days upon my return, because the UK is a notable absentee on our green list (though there are currently no restrictions regarding Northern Ireland).

To be honest, I’m contemplating doing just that. I work from home and live alone, so self-isolation wouldn’t be too tough. And I’ve already completed three weeks of quarantine, after contracting Covid back in April.

But if I were to head over, I would sure as hell keep it quiet. I have no doubt that if a picture from the English countryside were to pop up on my social media, I’d be inundated with vitriol from the Travel Shamers, who are presumably the same people who kept detailed notes whenever their neighbours left the house back in March.

I’m not the kind of person who flouts regulations – ever the apple polisher, I’ve stuck to the government guidelines every step of the way, even when they’ve been flagrantly ignored by the very politicians who put them in place. But there’s no doubt in my mind that were I to take a flight to the UK and head immediately to a friend’s house in the countryside, I would pose much less of a risk to public health than I would if I took the train down to Kerry for the weekend.

Of course, all of this could be moot, if our numbers continue to spike. After weeks of dwindling case numbers, our seven-day cumulative number of Covid-19 cases per 100,000 has risen to 16.3, according to the ECDC, compared to 10.9 in the UK and 10 in Italy.

Who knows how long it will be before we’re removed from the UK’s Green List, or banned from travelling entirely?

If you were to ask me in February where I longed to visit, I’d have given you a list of far-flung Polynesian islands, tiny Italian villages and hectic Japanese cities. But now, for the first time in years, I just want to go home.