Irish columnist John Walters understands the mask lie at the deepest level

"They need visible evidence of terror. They need to create a visiblity of the terror that they want to inculcate into people".

"These are really sinister people we are dealing with now. . .  we have to start thinking of them now as alien beings, as hostile beings to the Irish people.  The mask is a way of denying the very human state of a person . . . and turning us all into zombies, so that we look at each other coming down the street as a festering mess of bacteria and viruses which is a danger to my health!" . . .   "The thinking behind it is to destroy the spirit, the individuality, the personality of the human person".