Mandatory hotel quarantine is controversial for good reason

Nobody ought to be surprised that mandatory border quarantine has emerged as one of the most emotive issues in Ireland’s response to Covid-19. This is a liberal European country. The rationale for involuntarily depriving people of their liberty should never be considered a slam dunk here. If ever it is, then we may be in greater trouble in that moment than we realise.

As much as it is a public health, legal or economic issue, the mandatory isolation by the State of law-abiding people is also a cultural issue in this part of the world. It is facile to point to other regions where it is historically considered more acceptable, such as parts of Asia, and argue that no other justification is required for its similar implementation here.

You cannot just transplant a draconian policy response from one vastly different cultural eco-system, where civil liberties are on a different calculus, into another and expect there to be no friction.

But what about Australia and New Zealand? They’re liberal democracies of a European mode. If they can implement mandatory quarantine without all of our fuss and whining, why can’t we?

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Australia’s cultural attitude to issues such as the mandatory detention of foreign arrivals has always been slightly different to Europe’s. Its Christmas Island and Nauru offshore detention facilities, which opened as part of its morally dubious “Pacific Solution” for keeping asylum seekers on islands well away from the mainland, make our system of direct provision look like a bastion of ethics by comparison.

Mandatory hotel quarantine for travellers during a virus pandemic is, of course, a different practical issue to asylum. But with its grounding in the fear of outsiders, it exercises some of the same emotional muscles in many people. That fact has surely helped to make anti-virus quarantining more accepted in Australia. Christmas Island, almost 1,000 miles off the coast of Western Australia, was even used to quarantine Australian families returning from China early on in the pandemic.

Community transmission

New Zealand, meanwhile, has clearly made a success of the policy and it is popular there for that reason. It implemented it in a committed fashion early on in the pandemic, as part of an overall zero-Covid approach to eliminate community transmission of the virus and prevent it reseeding.

If this State was an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and not one of the world’s most globally connected economies sharing a free travel area and single market with 26 other nations that have different policies, and with the extra complication of a sensitive open land border with a geopolitical rival, then the debate in Ireland might have been different. As it is, it would be like trying to implement a zero-Covid policy in Wexford while the rest of the nation’s counties went their own way.

Also, our daily infection rate has barely been below 200 cases for seven months. After 3½ months of the current lockdown, they are stuck near 500 and nobody knows how to get them lower. It is now too late for a zero-Covid approach within the orbit of the highly transmissible UK virus variant.

If you point to New Zealand and argue for a “me too” approach in Ireland without taking account of any of the immovable factors above, either you are not arguing in good faith or your head is in a bucket of sand. I would also prefer to wait and see when, and how successfully, New Zealand unwinds its current policy, before making further judgment on it.

So if Ireland is not adopting a zero-Covid approach, why would it implement mandatory hotel quarantine for foreign arrivals now, with all of the obvious social, legal and economic issues it presents?

We are told it is to prevent the entry of new virus variants. That argument stumbles somewhat at the point where the N1 road becomes the UK’s A1 on the Louth/Down open border, or where the N2 becomes the A5 at Monaghan/Tyrone, or at any of the other 300 open border crossings with the jurisdiction of the UK, which will always have different travel policies to our own.

Virus variants

Other virus variants are highly likely to get into Ireland from the UK regardless of what happens at Dublin Airport, unless we also open hotels for quarantine on the M1 motorway. And once they’re in, they’re in. The best that Ireland can hope for now is to lessen some of the flow of new variants. And if a new vaccine-resistant Irish variant emerges on home soil, travel quarantine will be an irrelevancy.

The policy of mandatory hotel quarantine must be proportionate to the risks involved, but – and this is by far the most important point – it absolutely has to work sufficiently well for it to be worth it. There is no guarantee that the policy will have any appreciable effect on Ireland’s virus outcome, when you consider all of the other unique risk factors affecting this nation.

The lack of certainty over whether the policy will make any real difference to the virus outcome is important. It suggests mandatory hotel quarantine is being implemented here not just for public health reasons, but also to relieve political pressure on the Government. That is a flimsy reason for the State to deprive people, all of whom are carrying negative virus tests, of their liberty for 12 days. It goes back to the cultural issue from earlier. We cannot just sneer at civil liberties. Benefit must outweigh cost.

I believe Ministers were simply browbeaten into implementing travel quarantine to assuage an angry and frightened public who were whipped into further frenzy by activist scientists allied with the Government’s political opposition. The public was tricked into believing that quarantine would somehow lead to a loosening of our current exhausting lockdown. They swallowed it whole.

But it was always pure nonsense. Our lockdown came about as a result of domestic transmission that we inflicted upon ourselves. Locking up people in airport hotels will not prevent Irish people mixing in each other’s houses. Nor prevent it spreading in facilities such as meat plants.

The policy of mandatory border quarantine is not automatically xenophobic. But it has given succour to an ugly xenophobia that lurks beneath the surface of our society. The disgusting frenzy over the past week that was directed at two young Irish mothers who returned to Ireland from Dubai should also serve as further warning that, as a nation, we need to be careful here.

It is right and proper that the issue of quarantine is proving controversial. There is a lot at stake aside from the virus.