Gavan Reilly: Don’t expect a whitewash on Covid, or a lambasting either
Dr Martin Cormican’s interview ten days ago raising concern about the State’s handling of Covid – and the never-ending torrent of stories harvested from the WhatsApp messages of the former UK minister Matt Hancock – has spawned a national debate on how we dealt with the pandemic in general, and whether it’s time for a public inquiry into the State’s decision-making.
It strikes me that there’s two major categories of issues to get to the bottom of. The first is the actual decisions themselves: were lockdowns, or school closures, or mandatory hotel quarantine, warranted? (These are things which in hindsight might seem quite clear cut – and many of us are so scarred by the ongoing impact, our instinct is to say ‘of course not’ – but the decisions were not being made through the lens of pandemic fatigue, nor with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight that we might now enjoy.
The second is: how were those decisions influenced? Why, for example, did the government commission separate economic advice about prospective lockdowns in the run-up to Christmas 2020, but not at any other time? Did this input give the cabinet a different perspective that ended up leading to ruinous conclusions? And, of course, the big question: why was it that the Government sometimes felt it could adjust or disregard the advice given by NPHET, and in other cases that it felt so supine?
On the latter I think there’s one factor which has come to be overlooked: the fact that Covid arrived on our shores under the watch of a caretaker government. An administration with a mandate could have felt more emboldened to act with economic, cultural, and social concerns at heart. Instead, knowing the electorate had just handed them their marching orders, the outgoing caretaker ministers allowed public health experts to become the main face of the crisis. At the outset that suited them – compare the authority of public health officials appearing on TV in Ireland to give advice, versus a rotating coterie of unqualified ministers in Britain – but turned NPHET into such a powerful advisory body that ministers themselves (wrongly) felt they were powerless to ignore.
By the way, in case of there being any doubt: I fully recognise that the conduct and approach of the media is something that ought to be examined too. There’s a decent chance I’d be asked to give some kind of testimony to any inquiry, and it’s something I’d have no problem in doing. Like any decent journalist I’d seek to protect my sources, but I’m not so headstrong or proud to think that the pandemic was reported on perfectly, by me or anyone else. That said, those who weren’t in the room might lazily presume the questioning was all supine, friendly and uncritical. Far from it – it’s just that unless you saw the press conferences live on telly (and as time went on, uninterrupted live coverage became rarer) you didn’t see the question. On a TV news bulletin you’ll see the answer given to a question, but not the question itself.