Ireland’s lockdowns were harsher and longer than almost anywhere else in the developed world. The existential threat from the pandemic led to an unprecedented mass mobilisation of the state’s institutions. As Ireland was battered by waves of disease time and again, unparalleled pressures and untold tensions emerged as the country went to war with Covid, and policymakers and politicians did battle with each other.

Forensically researched and told with clarity and force, this book examines a defining era. Boasting unrivalled access to the key decision-makers, and drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews and thousands of pages of unpublished and confidential documents, the authors reveal the moves, the power-plays and the – at times jaw-dropping – tactics of a government with the health of a nation in its hands.