There was some amusement last week over a clip from a Mark Patterson show on Radio Ulster. A woman commenting on the stress of living through the pandemic, contrasted it with the Troubles. In the troubles, she said, you got shot or blown up but you didn't have the Covid.
ark himself seemed to prompt her towards the observation that the end of the Troubles brought a sense of relief and possibility while the pandemic just weighs down perpetually upon us.
I think the early days of the pandemic, the first lockdown, did feel like the worst period of the early Troubles. I was a young man then with high hopes of enjoying my work, meeting women and having a few bob in my pocket.
The cloud that descended with the bombing and the abuse from soldiers, from paramilitary neighbours and the threat of being killed by loyalists drained the taste for living from me.
Others have their own stories. I felt that Belfast had become bleak and dangerous.
The rough boys who just a year before might have jeered at me on the street or tried to pick a fight now threatened to blow up the office I worked in.
With the beginning of the pandemic came a sense of horror that to me felt similar. What both periods had in common for me was that they exposed the insecurity in which we live.
One day you are 18 and courtin' a wee protestant girl and able to go into town to bars and discos and the next there are barricades and shots in the night. And certainly some people were having it a lot worse than I was because I was never ordered from my home or cut by shrapnel or bereaved by violence within the close family.
But the response in me was a sagging disappointment, a disgust with people who thought that they were entitled to ruin the city in assertion of the demand for a united Ireland or as a declaration of loyalty, especially when neither cause had the remotest prospect of being advanced or dignified by that behaviour.
The news bulletins would often use phrasing like "tension is rising in Northern Ireland today..."
And what people who didn't live through it might not understand is that this was literally true. You could feel the tension in the air.
I felt that again in the spring with the first lockdown and the realisation that the rules by which we lived our lives had changed, the basics that we took for granted were no longer there.
When I phoned friends they told me that they were living with the same sleepless anxiety, not just a fear that they might get ill and die, for the odds were still relatively low, just as they were during the Troubles, though they were higher that you would get ill, as they were higher then that you would get injured.
The real burden on most of us was the disruption of our lives. And here is a close parallel between the Troubles and the pandemic.
Both put an end to dancing and dining out, cavorting in crowds. Both broke businesses and ruined jobs.
Both stripped people of opportunities to work and make friends, to form relationships.
The other way in which the pandemic is like the Troubles is in the way that people have adapted to it.
People didn't spend their whole time in the '70s and '80s worrying about being bombed or shot. I often hitchhiked between Donegal and Belfast during the hunger strikes. And strangers gave me lifts. We had office Christmas parties that were outright bacchanalian though sometimes it was tricky getting home through bomb scares when you were drunk.
Much of the time we were living our lives as if the carnage and destruction was irrelevant to us.
And that's how people are responding to the pandemic. They moan about the restrictions imposed on them for their own safety as they moaned about checkpoints erected to protect the jobs they were keeping them late for.
In neither circumstance has there been full agreement with the state on where civic responsibility lies.
The government wanted you to call the confidential number if you saw someone behaving suspiciously but many wouldn't have dreamed of doing that, risking being called a tout or getting shot. And anyway, they'd have said, don't a lot of those people who get killed have it coming to them?
They say now that those who die of Covid are old and were going to die anyway and they are just as heartless in demanding their right to scoff at the rules.
And as there was division among politicians then, so there is now. You knew back then that some politicians were not as anti-violence as they let on to be; much depended on whose violence you were talking about.
A similar kind of indulged irresponsibility is in the air today.
It is easy to suppose that it started with Trump talking of coronavirus as something that doesn't warrant much concern, but we had our leaders here during the Troubles who could put bravado above caution, sectarianism above compassion and we still have some who remember killers as heroes.
Maybe the thing that the two periods have most in common is that each was impossible to resolve on a consensus about what the core problem actually was.
The divisions today are over whether to prioritise business or healthcare as people fail to grasp that the overwhelming of our hospitals will leave people dying untended in their homes, suffocating. But, of course, when businesses collapse and people are unemployed there will be suffering too, suicide, breakdowns.
Other similarities between the Troubles period and the pandemic: most of us did not see the dead and the damaged. During the Troubles we heard the bombs in the night but, as with coronavirus our main encounters were with the disruption rather than with the disrupters.
The Troubles had the power to shock us occasionally with horrific events like the bombs that caused multiple deaths or the murder of children. Most people managed to conduct their lives with little sense of what was going on, apart from what they saw on the news or read in their newspaper.
The big difference of course is the death toll. The deaths from Covid-19 in Northern Ireland in this first year of the pandemic are about 10 times as many as died in the average year of the troubles, double the number that died in the worst year, 1972.
