Varadkar ‘not convinced’ benefits of Ireland’s final Covid-19 lockdown outweighed costs

The Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has questioned the Government’s use of lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic, suggesting that the benefits of the final shutdown in December 2021 may have been outweighed by its costs.

Mr Varadkar said the terms of reference for a Covid inquiry would go to Cabinet within the next couple of weeks so that it could begin its work early next year.

“One thing that I’d be particularly interested in as well is just to get an assessment as to what the long-term consequences of short-term decisions are,” he told reporters in Seoul during a trade mission to South Korea.

“Because I do remember at the time there was a lot of public pressure, and even pressure from the media and society in general to lock down quickly and lock down hard. I think we’re now, two or three years later, seeing some of the impacts, not of Covid the virus, but of the lockdowns on people’s mental health, on education, on the health service. Screenings that didn’t happen, diagnoses that didn’t happen.”

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Mr Varadkar said his sense was that the first lockdown “was absolutely the right thing to do”.

“We didn’t know what we were dealing with, a new virus, high mortality rate, no vaccines. Absolutely the right thing to do. The final lockdown, the one done for Omicron – I understand why that decision was made, I was there. But I’m not convinced that the benefits of that outweighed the non-benefits.”

The Taoiseach said that one of the challenges in setting up the inquiry was to find suitable people to sit on the panel, adding that the chair did not necessarily have to be a judge or a retired judge.

He said he did not expect the inquiry would feature WhatsApp message revelations similar to Britain’s current Covid inquiry and that he hoped it could complete its work within a year or 18 months.

“The terms of reference are going to be more about trying to establish exactly what happened, the facts of what happened during Covid and then what we did well, what we could do better, and how we could learn for future major public health crises,” Mr Varadkar said.

“I don’t think we want to go down a sort of judicial approach like they have in England. I’m not sure what’s going to be achieved by any of that. It might be very entertaining, but I’m not sure what’s actually going to be achieved by it.”