Time to widen our thinking instead of putting all our virus eggs in the quarantine basket
THE quarantine is window dressing, the wrong thing for the wrong time. This is generally what happens when you are trying to solve today’s problem with yesterday’s solution.
One practical reason for objecting to the quarantine is that it is easily circumvented by flying from Britain to Belfast. Movement from there to Dublin is easily achieved by either car rental or public transport.
However, my real problem with the quarantine is about the bigger picture. I’m concerned that as we move forward in our national reboot, we have not repurposed our national decision-making apparatus to guide us better along this path.
There are lots of people queueing up to analyse the recent past, the rights and wrongs. Generally, I think it’s a bit early for that. For the most part we’ve been lucky and firm decisions were taken when they were needed. More time needs to be invested in horizon scanning as we are not yet out of crisis.
However, going back to the quarantine conundrum. The question has to be asked: what is its point? Is it to limit the movements of those likely to spread infection? If so, as any garda or soldier would tell you (if anyone asked them), the Border is a big hole in that attempted defence.
The other problem with this is that we have inadvertently created ourselves as an unsecured backdoor into Britain for those wanting to dodge the UK quarantine.
Already wags have christened this anomaly as “The Dublin Dodge”. Were the right questions asked of this strategy?
It allows either UK or non-UK citizen to fly to Dublin, then catch a connecting flight on to the UK. As the UK is not quarantining those flying in from Ireland, those intent on “dodging” two weeks in limbo avoid quarantine.
But the questions that really need to be asked here are how did we miss this basic point? What other things may we be missing? And how can we improve our situational analysis and decision-making going forward?
One likely reason we missed a basic anomaly like this is because we are keeping our forward-thinking and analysis in the hands of too narrow a group.
We know the public health specialists of the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) have been leading the charge with their recommendations to the Government on managing the virus.
They give recommendations and the Government decides whether to adopt or not. However, the problem is not with Nphet; indeed, it has largely done sterling work. The problem is with the operational implementation of their medical advice.
This is largely under the purview of the SOG, or rather the Senior Officials Group, for the most part senior civil servants.
This group is largely what the Government has been relying on regarding our national reboot strategy and its operational implementation.
For the most part, keeping the decision making to a tight group reporting directly to the Taoiseach’s department made sense leading up to and during lockdown. However, it was a strange move and I would argue it is limiting us moving forward.
The SOG completely usurped other wellestablished State mechanisms for handling emergencies, such as the National Emergency Co-ordination Group (NEC) or the Office of Emergency Planning (OEP, normally run out of an office at the rear of Government Buildings so as to be as close as possible to the Taoiseach’s department).
The initial benefit of a tightly knit group of senior civil servants being able to formulate strategy rapidly and implement quick decisions has now been eclipsed by the need for a wider appreciation of the road forward.
The big advantage of having the NEC and OEP was access to a much wider set of knowledge and experience, especially from an operational implementation perspective.
During my time with the UN in crisis and conflict areas there would often be times for security and emergency purposes where we would have to create ad-hoc mechanisms involving, military, police, civilian and NGO representatives.
The benefits would be the mix of different professional thinking and knowledge.
There was also the fact that these groups provided for buy-in and shared responsibility for all actions on the ground.
The negatives were usually around the fact that you were creating a mechanism that was alien in culture to some groups. In our situation we already have those mechanisms.
It is now time we saw the NEC, the OEP, indeed the National Security Committee and other strategic thought groups brought into the process of government decision making.
These groups can give us more than just expert knowledge. Peopled as they are by those with good operational experience and applied analytical skills, they can allow us to do what all good crisis managers do: think backwards from our ideal end state, ask the right questions to interrogate developing strategies and determine if fit for purpose.
To find our way out of this phase, we must learn to apply counter-intuitive thinking and avoid group-think.
Time to widen our analytical net and operational thinking.