Life in Lockdown: Grounded by Covid, Kildare's Eoghan Corry reflects on his jet set lifestyle

To say Eoghan Corry’s life is hectic would be a major understatement but the respected travel writer revels in the thrills of exploring the world. When Covid-19 hit, the industry was decimated. Eoghan was grounded, his travels brought to an abrupt halt.

Surrounded by the beauty of his native Straffan, he has had to adapt to a new way of living until the industry starts back up again.

The industrious Corry is never short of things to do but these lockdowns have also afforded him time to reflect.

How have you been coping with life during lockdown?

As the industry I love crumbles around me, lockdown has some blessings. I have time to think and look back on the high-octane lifestyle I used to live, until that very last return flight from Colombia last March, when the first masks were being worn in the airports by people wary of a new virus in China.

I am locked down in a beautiful part of north Kildare, the plain of the Liffey and the range foothills of Lyons and Oughterard, surrounded by green fields, canal and glorious Liffey.

The local swans have grown a bit tired of me photographing them. They do not seem to appreciate how much I have worked to make them Instagram celebrities.

What is your daily routine?

There has been a lot of media as an interviewee (‘when can we book again?’), a lot of processing of data and scenarios, a lot of interviewing and a lot of meetings on Zoom, optimistically clicking on a link in the hope it will bring me into the right meeting.

Even the ballad sessions I love and could never get to are now online, so I can attend them, singing Covid parodies (‘nine long months I spent in lockdown’).

I was tied up in the government’s Tourism Recovery Task Force for most of 2020 and chaired the international demand section, unpaid, but with a warm feeling of contributing to the solution.

It was hugely interesting. I took on an unexpected new role as advisor and confessor to the travel industry. Even airlines CEOs and industry leaders were phoning me to find out what was going on, days running into each other, after midnight and before dawn.

Travel outbound and tourism inbound are both bleeding and many of the key players occasionally get despondent. It can be a little like Pieta House at times.

The aviation guys crack me up.

Nothing phases them. For them it is all: “let’s get back in the skies, grow the market share, take advantage of weaknesses in the opposition.”

That has been a revelation. A lesson to us all.

What do you miss most from our pre-Covid lives?

To paraphrase LP Hartley, pre-Covid was a foreign country, in my case a foreign country a week, sometimes more than one. Lots of early mornings at the airport, breakfast in the lounge, snatch sleep on the aircraft, and straight into the destination review or the event.

It was great and I loved it. But I never got time to review what happened because each day hit me as soon as the previous one was over. I am looking back on photographs, thousands of them, for the first time, and reliving some very pleasant experiences by unlocking the detail of memory I had forgotten.

Commercially it has been disastrous.

Finances were in negative for all of 2020, and getting that turned around is going to be a lot trickier than I expected.

I ended up working very hard in the anticipation of what would come at the end of it.

As a travel writer, how do you see the next 12 months panning out for the industry?

Travel and tourism are going to need some luck to get restarted, inbound or outbound — luck with testing, vaccines and, above all, infection rates across Europe and the world.

When the storm abates, there will be a huge seat sale by airlines and travel companies, and the question is whether the consumer will be confident enough to take the bait.

For home holidays, self catering is the product whose day has come.

The big stadium stuff like festivals is at least another year away. Bookings will be very very late, making it difficult to plan for customer and service provider alike. But this is an industry that gets beaten up by weather, strikes and other disruptions, and recovers. It is just that this one has gone on longer than most.

If you could travel one place in the world right now, where would it be and why would you choose that location?

Back to the beautiful Faroe Islands. What a great place to be locked down, and it has the lowest infection rate in Europe. It brings out the inner Viking in us all.

Have you any aspirations for when the lockdown ends?

I am surprised how little I have written. I wrote three books in 2009, when I was travelling to 35 countries and endlessly in the air. And none in 2020.

I have lots of incomplete written material, including the Kildare GAA history, for which a lot of work has been done but that has only reminded me of the huge amount still to do.

It is a repeat of my very first book, published when I was 20, and I am looking forward to seeing it between the sheets, so to speak.