Jennifer O’Connell: Ireland’s third wave struggle is still targeting the wrong things

Anita Varga isn't planning to leave the country any time soon. But when the restrictions on international travel lift, she hopes to get a flight to see her elderly parents in Budapest.

There is a problem, however. Her son’s passport is out of date, and the Department of Foreign Affairs has stopped processing “routine applications” since Christmas Eve, the third time in 12 months the service has been suspended.

In the space of a couple of beats, we've gone from polite Government suggestions about avoiding non-essential travel, to the threat of a jail sentence

Online applications won't be processed again until Ireland is at Level 4. We're told – via one of the now-customary series of bombs dropped casually in interviews – that this may be nine weeks away, after which it could take another eight weeks to clear the backlog, the department estimates. Her husband made an enquiry via the passport office webchat and was told that while "we are certainly not 'refusing' anyone a passport . . . a holiday to visit parents does not meet our criteria to be processed as an emergency."

Those criteria include “bereavement, illness or medical treatment overseas”. Irish citizens abroad can avail of the oxymoronic “weekly urgent” service, while “adult renewals for work purposes are facilitated on a weekly basis” with a letter from an employer.

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“Passport service staff do not have access to private, personal data when working outside of our secure offices,” the department says by way of explanation. But this seems more than a bit disingenuous, when Revenue staff are working away remotely with equally private and personal data, and driver’s licences are still being issued. Britain may have introduced mandatory hotel quarantine to discourage travel, but it hasn’t stopped issuing passports.

You don’t have to be a signed up member of the tin foil hat brigade to suspect there’s something more at play here. Good luck getting that toothache fixed in Lanzarote without a passport, lads.

In the space a couple of beats, we’ve gone from polite Government suggestions about avoiding non-essential travel, to a modest fixed charge fine of €100, to a fine of €500, to plans for a penalty of €2,000 and mandatory hotel quarantine, to the threat of a jail sentence. And there’s also the blanket “pausing” of online passport renewal, ostensibly for reasons of safety, but convenient all the same.

There are dangerous new variants of the virus in circulation globally, and measures are needed to stop them coming into the country. But the focus on preventing people flying out contributes to the public’s mounting sense that we’re still fixating on the wrong things. The Government insists its approach is guided by public health data but whatever is trending on Twitter, or exercising callers to Liveline, seems to be a factor too.

What the data actually reveals is that since the start of the third wave on November 22nd, there have been 230 outbreaks in workplaces, more than 1,500 in private homes, and just 18 associated with travel. As of February 12th, only 132 people have been fined by gardaí for heading to the airport or port for non-essential reasons. Some days, there must have been more reporters and TV cameras at the airport than people fleeing to the sun.

We will be dismayed, too, by how eagerly we embraced shame as a form of social control

Seven weeks into the strictest of lockdowns, with at least nine more weeks to go, community cases are still alarmingly high and there’s no sense that anyone in charge has a handle on why. The now dominant B117 variant is much more transmissible, certainly, but it is not able to pass through brick walls. If everyone was staying home, it would have nowhere to go. Research from the Economic and Social Research Institute suggests a more plausible explanation than travel: the cohort of people who have convinced themselves they’re paragons of compliance, when in fact they still have a lot of discretionary contacts.

Lanzarote tans are an easier target for collective ire than workplaces, but all of those pathogens ripping through family homes are being seeded somewhere, and it’s not a bar in Puerto del Carmen. The 51 outbreaks in food-processing plants during this wave may have been hard to prevent but what about the 25 outbreaks in offices? How much of that work genuinely cannot be done remotely?

Meanwhile, frustratingly little attention is being directed to things that could make a difference, such as widespread antigen testing, which the National Public Health Emergency Team has been painstakingly considering since last August without any resolution. Retrospective contact tracing is another gaping omission in its strategy – this week, one in four cases are still not being fully investigated to find the source.

When we look back on all of this, what will we say? We'll say that Ireland's struggle against the third wave was a story of grand gestures aimed at the wrong targets. We'll say that when the public most needed leadership, they got mixed messages, prevarication and promises that a decision would be made, but maybe not until next week. No journalist will ever complain about getting a scoop, but you'd think the Cabinet would at least be able to co-ordinate its leaks and kites. On Thursday, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said in a newspaper interview that we would be in lockdown for at least another nine weeks; hours later, Green Party leader Eamon Ryan told Matt Cooper that it wouldn't be wise to speculate on timings.

We will be dismayed, too, by how eagerly we embraced shame as a form of social control, how ready we were to turn on each other and be distracted by fresh objects of vitriol. We seem to have accepted the pausing of passports as just necessary curtailment of our basic freedoms under coronavirus, along with the suspension of schools and the right to walk on a beach 6km from home. But unless the Government is prepared to seal the border, as it did during the Foot and mouth outbreak 20 years ago, shutting down the passport service is like bringing in the Army to trap a fruit fly in your kitchen, and forgetting to close the back door.