Fergus Finlay: Ireland should take pride in how it responded to the covid-19 crisis

Those trips around St Patrick’s Day are often portrayed as freebies and junkets. It’s not a fair portrayal. They’re actually a pretty fundamental cornerstone of what’s sometimes called Ireland’s soft power. 

I’ve met senior politicians and public servants from all sorts of other places who marvel at the access that Ireland has managed to generate and the uses to which it has been put.

But as the taoiseach travelled to the States that year (after a pretty intense debate about whether he should go at all), all sorts of information was coming in about the dangers posed by something called covid-19. 

Already we knew that something terrible had happened in Bergamo in Italy and that the whole of Lombardy had been placed under quarantine.

Boris Johnson knew all of that too. And laughed about it. He described covid as “nature’s way of dealing with old people” and couldn’t be bothered to attend any of the UK Cabinet-level emergency meetings about it. 

Instead he went to Chevening, a government-owned stately manor surrounded by gardens and pleasure grounds. And failed to finish his book, because he was utterly preoccupied with problems in his love life.

On March 12, from the steps of Blair House in Washington, our taoiseach told us what the public health advice was and what the government had decided. 

He announced that schools, colleges, and childcare facilities would be closed immediately. All indoor mass gatherings of more than 100 people and outdoor mass gatherings of more than 500 people would have to be cancelled. 

And he warned that more was to come.

The following day, Johnson refused to close schools. His government’s “Plan A” was to create something called “herd immunity” — allow everyone to get it, hope that not too many die and that the survivors become immune to the virus. 

Publicly, he said: “I must level with you, I must level with the British public: many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.”

Privately he said: “Why are we destroying everything for people who will die soon anyway?”

As we all know, within a couple of weeks the virus was everywhere, and our country at every level was fighting as hard as it could to contain it. 

We all became familiar with phrases like ‘flattening the curve’ and ‘cocooning’. Ordinary day-to-day life got harder and harder for all sorts of people, especially as social distancing requirements became tougher. 

We still don’t know the long-term damage caused by the disruptions to children’s education. 

And of course, the tragedy of untimely death from covid was compounded in the cruellest way by the inability of families to mourn, because of the requirements of social distancing.

Well before the taoiseach left for the States, in fact at the end of January, our government had established the National Public Health Emergency Team, which we all came to know and love as Nphet, and gave it wide authority. 

A group consisting of the secretaries general from each government department had been put in place to make recommendations about anything considered necessary.

Within the HSE, which would inevitably have to do most of the heavy lifting, crisis management teams dealing with operations, communications, and clinical issues had all been in place and working since early February.

The board of the HSE had its first emergency meeting on March 6 that year and from then on met once a week, usually on a Wednesday night, to provide such support and guidance (including financial authorisations) as it could, and to try to ensure accountability for the enormous logistical and investment decisions being made.

 (Although I’m a member of the board of the HSE, I’m not breaking any confidence here. The minutes of all those bodies are available online.)

While all this was going on, the people of the UK were being told lie after lie. 

While they had the capacity to test about 6,000 people, Johnson told the population: “We are going up from 5,000 to 10,000 tests per day, to 25,000, hopefully very soon up to 250,000 per day.”

By the end of March that year, Ireland had trained around 1,400 public servants as contact tracers, and our test and trace programme went on to be recognised as one of the most effective in the world. 

Johnson and his pathetic health secretary Matt Hancock set up a testing programme on March 11 and announced they were restricting it to hospitals the following day.

We struggled, in a market sometimes described as the wild west, to get all the personal protective equipment (PPE) we needed. But somehow we got there. 

On April 17 nurses in the British NHS were asked to wear aprons because the PPE had almost run out.

In May, the Irish rock band U2 flew in millions of masks and other pieces of PPE equipment from China for the HSE. At their own expense. 

Meanwhile, in the UK a vast range of companies and individuals, all with links to the Tory Party, made millions out of offering to secure PPE around the world.

We are going, I strongly hope, to have a public inquiry into how we managed the covid emergency. 

I have no doubt that we all made mistakes, every one of us. I have no doubt that there are lessons to be learned about how we all handled the last pandemic.

And actually when I say “we” I don’t mean you. You were extraordinary throughout. I mean the politicians, the managers, the decision-makers, and the advisers.

I suspect everyone involved in the management of the pandemic response in Ireland must have moments where they ask themselves could we have done better at that particular moment or in respect of that particular decision?

None of us, I’m guessing, can claim to be right all the time. But there was none of the ugliness, the disgusting misogyny, the political back-biting, the greed and corruption, the utter lack of care that is being revealed every day about the way in which the UK’s leaders let its people down.

Mistakes and all, what I saw in Ireland — from taoiseach, tánaiste, and minister on down — was honesty and good faith, and unremitting hard work to try to save and protect everyone. 

Although, of course, I’m not British, as a former political operative (who believes passionately in party politics) I feel nothing but shame when I read what is emerging about how Boris Johnson and his loathsome gang of cronies behaved. 

When I look back on how we tried to do it in Ireland, I feel a lot of pride.