Former President Mary McAleese has praised the response of Irish people to the coronavirus crisis as "phenomenal".
She told The Pat Kenny Show that the country won't get through this crisis unless there's a sense of communities working together.
Mrs McAleese said she's been hugely impressed by how people have reacted in very difficult circumstances.
She told Pat Kenny: “I think this is one of the things that has been probably the most uplifting part of the story… this is a great test of people: a test of what is deep inside them, and what they’re capable of producing when the chips are down and they have to.
“Here in Ireland, the response has been phenomenal: the goodness, the kindness, the decency, the looking out for people.”
Saying it was interesting how fast Irish people had adapted to the new restrictions, she observed: "A lot of this stuff is completely counter-cultural for us - we’re handshaking, huggy-wuggy people, we’re social people… in a queue in a supermarket we like to stand and chat.
“We know that it’s for our good and the good of the entire country, and it’s the capacity to change quickly and accept the change… we don’t have to like it, we just have to do it - and that’s what we’re doing.
“The speed with which we have done that I think is a testimony to the sense of community and decency that’s out there."
Mrs McAleese said it's currently "very hard to project forward almost a week at a time", let alone what could happen after the current crisis.
However, she said: “We have very busy lives, and we probably don’t spend enough time at home… to some extent I’m enjoying not having to do that, and a sense of luxury of sitting at home, conscious of course of the fact there are plenty of people who would prefer not to be.
“Maybe, just maybe beyond this, the ways that we’ve found of connecting to each other would definitely change."
She added: “People of my mother’s generation - including my mother - have now become for the first time in their lives proficient with using Facetime, WhatsApp, iPads… they’ve moved into the era of technology seamlessly having resisted it right into their late 80s… I think that’s been a fantastic change.
“There’s a lot more people working from home… after all this is over I suppose people will run tests to see how effective that has been, and if more people could do it. Could you give more flexibility to people in the workforce?
"That could take care of some of our childcare issues… who knows.”
