GAVAN REILLY: Don’t shoot the messenger: NPHET doesn’t make the rules

Ronan Glynn misstepped when he said people must ‘do just that little bit more’ to stop case numbers rising – what more can you do, than everything? – but when Glynn spoke about restrictions surviving until June he was being asked specifically about international travel and working from home (well, duh). It wasn’t Glynn’s fault that journalists extrapolated that further and put his face beside them.

But yet, another week, another slew of annoyance with NPHET, not all of which is justified. The same mistakes keep being made by a large number of people: NPHET is not in charge of running Ireland’s response to the pandemic; NPHET is not in charge of Ireland. Ireland is run by the Irish government; NPHET just offers advice on how to deal with it. If the government sometimes complaints that NPHET has too much sway, or that ministers themselves don’t really feel like they’re calling the shots, it’s because ministers either aren’t asserting themselves or are being circumvented by their party leaders cooking up a decision and presenting it to the Cabinet as a fait accompli.

There’s one other way in which NPHET has managed to accrue such sway and public authority: because it’s out there talking so regularly. Twelve months ago Tony Holohan was taking live televised press conferences on a daily basis. Often we aired them on Virgin Media One for a prime teatime audience. The authority was built up simply because the transparency was there. It’s not entirely a coincidence that the situation deteriorated when Holohan was off the scene in late summer. Even now, when there’s much less to say other than ‘hold firm’, Ronan Glynn and Philip Nolan are taking press conferences twice a week to deal with any queries arising.

You don’t see the Government doing that. Part of that is because the Government simply can’t get into regular blue-sky, what-if-this-and-this press conferences where they speculate about the world that might be around the bend. NPHET has mastered the art of not speculating and pivoting every question back to the public health advice. Ministers have yet to crack the same nut and then venture into speculation weeks before it can be delivered.

On which note: the decisions will be made in a week’s time. Only then can politicians read the signals and decide what is tolerable and what is not. I say this as someone who will spend most of the next week trying to fill the void anyway: anything before that is folly.