Schools and colleges are reopening for a new term, shops are filled with customers and traffic in some places has returned to pre-pandemic levels. With the lifting of public health restrictions it is easy to feel that the crisis phase is rapidly winding down. That’s not guaranteed, of course, and significant numbers of people are still falling ill with Covid-19 every day, but the current respite does create some space in which to begin to look back and assess how the country handled the emergency.
The best way of doing this would be a public inquiry. It is essential that a rigorous and comprehensive examination take place of the State’s actions over the course of the pandemic. This will not be the last such crisis the country faces, so it is vital that lessons be learned. The terms of reference of any inquiry would be broad enough to encompass analysis of structural questions – how Government made its decisions, for example, and how it interacted with other arms of the State, including the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) – but also specific issues such as procurement of ventilators and protective equipment during the frantic early days of the crisis, delays in establishing test-and-trace capacity and measures taken to protect care homes.
It would assess the State’s pandemic preparedness and take in aspects that are widely regarded as successful (the vaccination programme) as well as those generally seen as failures (the Christmas 2020 reopening). How close did the hospital system really come to collapse? Why was the State so slow to advise people to wear face-masks or to adopt measures to mitigate airborne transmission? Why did Covid spread so rapidly in nursing homes? How did vulnerable communities fare? How did vested interests influence policymaking? These questions have already been debated, but an open inquiry with the time, the resources and the power to gather all relevant information, hear from key players and assess the evidence would cast new light on each of them.
Tánaiste Leo Varadkar has said any inquiry can wait until after the pandemic has ended. There is no need to delay, however. The pandemic could last for years. Better to start this work now, while memories are fresh. Sweden has already appointed a commission of experts to investigate the country's controversial light-touch approach to virus containment. Its final report is due next year, but it is also publishing interim reports as it goes. In Norway, an independent commission tasked with assessing the country's handling of the pandemic issued a 450-page report last April.
Ireland is emerging from an unprecedented public health crisis and a society-wide trauma. Understanding what happened and providing a full accounting of the State’s actions – and their context – is essential for good governance. And it’s the least the public deserves.