Political economy injects itself into Covid-19 crisis decisions

Since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, political decision-makers have deferred to public health officials when making decisions about the management of the pandemic and the Government’s response to it.

Ministers, notably Minister for Health Simon Harris, have made a virtue of the fact that the politicians were acting entirely on the public health advice. It is an approach that has, by and large, served them and the country well.

The most important fact about Ireland’s experience of Covid-19 is that the catastrophe of some other countries has not been replicated here – hospitals have not been overwhelmed, death rates have not exploded, community infection has been largely suppressed.

But because of the effectiveness of the control and suppression strategy, we are now entering a new phase of the response to the crisis. And that will have different rules and different challenges.

Coronavirus: People will have to get used to ‘new normal’, Holohan warns

---

Irish patients to be involved in trials for Covid-19 drug treatments

---

Coronavirus: Gardaí have made 76 arrests for breaches of lockdown regulations

---

Michael McDowell: Donald Trump is running out of scapegoats

---

For one thing, political and administrative norms – the way we usually do things and the rules by which Government in its broad sense abides – will gradually reassert themselves.

Restriction easing

That will require greater input into decisions from other interests – not solely public health experts – in the future. So there was a significant push from several Cabinet Ministers on Tuesday for a greater easing of the coronavirus restrictions next week. Two things are at work here: it represents not just the reality that social and economic considerations will have to be taken into account in decisions on easing the lockdown, but also a pushback from the members of the Cabinet – supposedly the ultimate decision-making body in the country but which has been effectively sidelined in recent weeks, in favour of a small group of senior officials, the Taoiseach and the Minister for Health.

“Worse than the EMC,” said one person, referring to the tight-knit group of politicians and senior officials at the centre of the 2011-2016 Fine Gael-Labour government, officially the Economic Management Council, and much resented by uninvolved ministers for making all the important decisions and then bringing them to Cabinet to be rubber-stamped. The bottom line is that the Cabinet has been largely excluded, and now Ministers are beginning to chafe against that.

According to a number of sources either present or subsequently briefed, a clear majority of Ministers who spoke were in favour of lifting the present lockdown to a greater or lesser degree next week. And while several accept the caution of the health experts and their Minister at the table (and few would take Harris’s job, if the truth be told), they believe the Government should make clear to people that the restrictions will be gradually eased over the coming months.

Infection second wave

The sense among several Ministers, according to one person, was that these are not just health decisions – they are political decisions to make. They believe that it is the job of political leaders to consider the health advice and weigh the economic and social implications but also to assess the state of public tolerance for continued restrictions. That was one thing on which several Ministers contributed to the meeting, it is understood.

The health advice remains cautious, as it must. Senior officials are especially fearful that easing the restrictions will lead to a “second wave” of infections, which will lead to avoidable deaths, for which “we would be blamed”, one Minister said.

But there is a social cost to the country being shut down economically as well. If the economy is profoundly damaged, this will eventually mean fewer resources to spend on the public services, less public investment, more taxation that hurts individual wealth. All those things have an impact on the health of people, too. Significantly, Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe was said to be among those making this argument on Tuesday.

During the acute phase of the crisis – when health officials and politicians struggled to keep disaster at bay – those potential problems seemed remote. But as Ireland enters the next phase of this crisis, we will hear more of them. Progress brings its own problems.