I really hope we can get to get away too, but all the noise seems to be that we are getting ready to impose a NZ/Australia level quarantine procedure. The change in tone over the past 3 weeks is quite stark with the Cabinet, remains to be seen whether they will go ahead with it but I have a feeling they may.
Now with us entering the warmer months in the future they may relax this over the summer as opposed to shutting our borders.
I was looking forward to getting away in the summer but now I am not as confident. I do wonder if we might shut up shop for 2021, allow the world to get vaccinated before travel returns in early 2022. Probably means by the summer we can lift most restrictions but as a consequence you cannot enter the country without quarantining.
I think also there's been a change in thinking with the cabinet.
To me there appears to be two options available post Easter:
1) open up the pubs/restaurants gradually when the numbers are sufficiently low enough for it and track and trace can cope. Prevent most tourism from coming into the country and make it very difficult for our own to go on a foreign holiday. Can do this by enforcing strict (and expensive) quarantine. Let people vacation in the UK
2) have many restrictions remain in place for pubs/restaurants. Allow foreign travel and holidays to the continent.
Learning from last Summer, all the above can't happen and a choice needs to be made for this Summer. Our issue last Summer was people returning from foreign holidays in Spain, France, Italy and reintroducing the virus multiple times. I would say with the recent emergence of different variants that the government may lean for something like option 1 until at least the Autumn. In option 1 they could if they wanted try to create some sort of bubble with Ireland - travel between both counties is allowed, travel from either to a third country is made extremely difficult.
What they choose has to give the best chance that this is the last lockdown, the last time that businesses will be shut (even if they are to reopen slowly) and the last time the health system is put under this kind of pressure.