School closures loom – it’s no wonder we parents are anxious

IF UNITY is central to enduring a second lockdown, then the next six weeks are to be dreaded. The belief that we were all in this together was popular during fraught weeks in spring, even if it strained under the mildest application of scrutiny.

It is a much harder conceit to maintain in lockdown redux.

A sense of common purpose is not easily renewed when one party to the pact seems to do all the suffering.

Enormous demands have been placed on people once again.

We are three days back into a rolling cycle of privations, the effect of which will not, this time, be softened by novelty.

Businesses are closed and tens of thousands of people are out of work again. This suffering is for the greater good, we are told, but the creeping fear is that the effort of the Irish people is in vain, and that lockdown will be a recurring fall-back for a country with no coherent plan.

This lockdown will be different, goes the sales pitch, because there is now a wider understanding of the virus and its effects, and the actions needed to mitigate the worst of them.

Yet the State’s plan in response is creaking alarmingly, less than 72 hours into six weeks of restrictions, with the implicit threat of extended agonies if these ones don’t work.

The test and trace system crumpled at the start of this week, with consequences for perhaps thousands of infected people.

Apologies and reassurances from the Minister for Health and the head of the Health Service Executive were meagre consolation. The failure to build and adequately resource such a function – one recognised as critical in successful responses not just to this pandemic but previous outbreaks in recent years – betrays a short- sightedness in the official response that is revealed in another crucial area.

The calamitous consequences of another school shutdown are keenly understood, f rom the effects on the development of children, to the suffering of pupils from difficult backgrounds who rely on the refuge provided by the schools, to the severe stresses home-schooling would reimpose on parents who have balanced educating and working for months already this year.

Concerns that the teaching unions would rail against schools remaining open during Level 5 restrictions began to grow last weekend and quickly reached Government Buildings.

The Sunday papers then bulged with statistics illustrating how safe schools are, compared to other settings. The evidence in this regard is compelling, but it has been wielded in reaction to the concerns of unions, and in particular the dreadful prospect of a teachers’ strike.

This is of a piece with a public response that has been sluggish and reactive.

AMID a fresh slew of figures later in the week, attesting to the relative safety of the classroom, the HSE admitted that it needed to react more swiftly to cases involving schools, with the dutiful promise that processes would be bolstered after next week’s mid-term break. They simply must be. If the positivity rate in schools is three times lower than within the wider community, then the case for keeping them open is obvious; but this can only be guaranteed by the State doing its part and assuaging the concerns of teachers around test and trace, as well as the provision of PPE.

Yesterday’s remarkable news that a type of hand sanitiser in use in some schools carried a health risk merely deepened the suspicion that official supports are desperately inconsistent.

No wonder parents are anxious. Trusting that the official response will be sufficient is becoming an act of faith.

The closure of schools would have a ruinous effect, but that ghastly vista looms.