Stories change according to need. That’s the core precept of every PR exercise that governments carry out across the world. Ireland’s government is no different. What is perhaps exceptional about it is its ability to flip-flop so effortlessly.
When promises are broken they’re not really broken. If the public has been shouting about a zero COVID approach akin to the one seen in New Zealand for nearly a year it didn’t really happen. That’s because the government has said that nobody called for such tactics. Other world leaders should take note as they could learn a thing or two from our homegrown sophists.
Government ministers have made some of these claims in the last 24 hours.
The government versus the data
At a press conference yesterday taoiseach Micheál Martin told those in attendance that “we've never been advised to go into zero Covid”. Although official advice may have been lacking the attitude of the public to restrictions is a good indicator of things. Polling data has shown that not only is the public in favour of the restrictions already in place but also more stringent ones.
According to data published by Amárach Research on 25 January, 49% of those it asked believe the government’s response to the pandemic has been “Insufficient”. A further 59% believe there should be more restrictions. Data it published in August last year showed that 47% thought there should be more restrictions. And 41% said the government’s response was “not sufficient”.
These patterns change when the virus has been tamped down: When the number of reported cases are low people are happy with the government’s response.
The National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) may not have made a clear recommendation to pursue a zero COVID approach. But there’s a obvious appetite amongst the public for something more than the current rinse and repeat of hobbling from lockdown to lockdown. People both need and want more.
Backtracking
Yesterday, and along similar truth-bending lines, Martin said “there will be no half-measures from him when it comes to suppressing the virus”.
Recent history proves otherwise. The government has consistently undermined and ignored the advice of NPHET in order to put the economy first. I wrote about as much three weeks ago. But recent history is there to be ignored.
Health minister Stephen Donnelly has also jumped into the revisionist fray to make his own contribution. Last week he told the Dáil that by September the health system will have offered everyone in the country a vaccination. But today he decided to backtrack. Speaking on Radio 1 with Claire Byrne he insisted that he never made such a promise. He told her “It wasn’t a promise” and “was heavily caveated”. September is now, instead, an “aspiration”.
Late last year political editor of the Irish Times Pat Leahy praised the government for putting NPHET in its place by publicly attacking it. He argued that even if the government’s plan to reopen the economy early resulted in “several hundred cases a day” it was still, perhaps, “a price worth paying”.
In this morning’s political digest email from the Irish Times, Leahy wrote of NPHET’s warning that many more deaths from COVID are on our way. And even though the “worst of the third wave” seems to be going past, “it will extract a fearful price”. The connection between Leahy’s position last year and our current situation is never mentioned.
It’s all history
An Irish government has told a population that has been largely compliant and extremely patient that they never really called for what they’ve been calling for. A health minister insisted to people that they would be vaccinated by a certain date. And now that date isn’t fixed. Instead it’s become a maybe or a perhaps.
Martin’s government has never taken half measures. It never ignored the advice of NPHET. Nor did it keep the economy open longer than it should have due to pressure from various lobbyists. It also didn’t underinvest in the contact tracing and testing systems. Their collapse, such as the inability to test close contacts of those infected with the virus, was entirely coincidental.
At least that’s the history the government is now trying to sell us. It’s nothing short of gaslighting an entire country.
Its new tale is that lockdown will be eased from 5 March. Who knows for sure what will happen. But some publicans have already said they’re hoping they can reopen in March. Considering the pressure exerted on the government by the Vintners’ Federation of Ireland (VFI) in the last few months, it’s not an unlikely scenario.
When the case numbers inevitably spike yet again, we’ll hear how no half measures were taken. Even though the public wanted a proper response to the pandemic, we’ll be told the government provided one. To believe otherwise would be madness, wouldn’t it?