Fintan O’Toole: Democracies learn from mistakes. We need an honest inquiry into the pandemic

The Irish banking calamity reached its climax on September 29th, 2008, when the State issued its fateful guarantee for deposits and liabilities. The Oireachtas inquiry into the disaster published its report on January 27th, 2016. There were 2,676 days between the event and the official postmortem.

On this precedent, if we were to date the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Ireland to February 29th, 2020, when the first death was reported, our official inquiry will report on June 28th, 2027.

Close to a year ago, Leo Varadkar said that "I do think when this is all over we are going to have to have some sort of assessment or inquiry [into] what was done right or wrong."

Last February, Micheál Martin conceded that “when we emerge from Covid we should have a full evaluation or inquiry to not only learn the lessons but understand, particularly in the context of nursing homes, what happened.”

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If there is going to be an inquiry, we need to decide now about what it is for, how it can be done and especially how it can publish a report in 2022 rather than in 2027.

Should there be an inquiry at all? To understand why there should be, just look across the Irish Sea. Without a proper public process, the disastrous early response of Boris Johnson’s government has become a vehicle for an incestuous revenge drama – shrouds waved as flags of convenience.

Those who died and their families deserve something much more dignified than that. The pandemic is above all a human tragedy. The dominant emotion in any public reflection on it must be grief.

The mistakes that were made here were – again so far as we know – the honest mistakes of people trying to do their best under awful pressure

We need that public accounting because without it there are two equally undignified alternatives. One is oblivion. The other is a cynical blame game. Neither should be acceptable.

There is, in any case, an awful lot to be learned. Covid-19 has been a ferocious stress test for government, for every branch of the civil and public service, for the health system, for our way of organising care for our elders, for people with disabilities and for vulnerable groups. We would not wish such an examination on ourselves, but when it happens, its results must be honestly understood and acted on.

Historically, epidemics and pandemics are normal. There are reasons to believe that global health crises will become increasingly common. There will be a next time and what happened this time should prepare us for it.

This is not abstract. The countries that did best in controlling Covid-19 infections were the ones that had learned most from the SARS outbreak of 2002 and 2003 and the MERS crisis that began in 2012.

The evidence suggests that some aspects of the Irish response to Covid-19 have been good. We did not have a Johnson or a Trump or a Bolsonaro, desperate to deny the seriousness of the threat. We did not, so far as we know, have the kind of flagrant cronyism in the awarding of public contracts that was so shamelessly indulged in Britain.

The mistakes that were made here were – again so far as we know – the honest mistakes of people trying to do their best under awful pressure. Nonetheless, there were mistakes, and they need to be explained.

Why was the carefully prepared system for handling emergencies simply ditched, apparently in panic? Why was the wearing of masks, even on public transport, dismissed for so long? Why was there no real attempt to co-ordinate policy on an all-island basis?

Why was incoming travel allowed to continue without any real hindrance, so that, having successfully suppressed the first wave of the virus, we managed to reseed it with new variants? Why did the madness of a “meaningful Christmas” take hold with such appalling consequences?

What we do not need, though, is either a lawyer-dominated tribunal or a party political show trial

Why, all through April this year, did the Government refuse to put India on the quarantine list, even while it listed Bangladesh and Pakistan, which had 10 times fewer cases? Why was there such reluctance to learn from the successes of Asian countries?

Above all, we need to understand what happened in nursing homes and residential care institutions, especially in the first months of the pandemic. About one in every 20 nursing home residents died with Covid-19 in the first five months of the pandemic.

We had a very good expert panel report on this last year. But, reasonably enough, it focused largely on immediate measures to improve safety in nursing homes. It raised a lot of fundamental questions about the way we treat elder care that need to be addressed in a much more public and political forum.

What we do not need, though, is either a lawyer-dominated tribunal or a party political show trial. The first would drag on for years and become pointlessly adversarial. The second would become merely rhetorical.

The inquiry should be conducted by an all-party Oireachtas committee. The work to establish it should begin now, so that it can start hearings in September and report within a year. It should be given all the resources and expert assistance it needs. Democracies learn from their mistakes. The ability to do so with honesty and seriousness will tell us a lot about the health of our Republic.