In praise of clarity and conviction
Emily Hourican pays tribute to Dr Tony Holohan
IT seemed to be a Covid19 briefing like any other of the recent evening updates. Until the moment when, uncharacteristically hesitant, Dr Tony Holohan said to the assembled media: “If I may detain you for a minute, just slightly unusually, I have a personal statement that I’m going to read if that’s all right …”
The statement announced that the chief medical officer and chair of the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) would be taking time out from all work commitments to be with his family. His wife, Emer, who was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, in 2012, had been admitted for palliative care last Saturday.
“I now want to give my energy, attention and all my time to Emer and our two teenage children, Clodagh and Ronan,” said Holohan.
“We know his style well by now,” one of the journalists present said. “He is very able to control his emotions. We had no idea this was coming.” In fact, the journalist said, Holohan had been more agitated the day before. “We thought then it was because there had been a slight increase in cases. But this explained it.”
Set against the many difficulties of the last four months and Ireland’s Covid-19 response, there have been a few fragile silver linings. Chief among these has been a sense of community. If Covid-19 has brought us closer together as a country, and many of us feel it has, then the banner under which we have been united has been Dr Tony Holohan.
In the very dark early days, when we had no real idea what we were dealing with, the slim sense of certainty to be got from Holohan’s nightly briefings, was a lifeline. The chaos was held at bay with his careful and clear statement of exactly where we were — the numbers that told the story in clear terms — and what we needed to do.
Against the rush of fear that threatened sometimes to overwhelm us, there was the path mapped for us by the chief medical officer: “This is where we are. This is where we are going. This is what we are doing. This is what we need to do.”
The numbers weren’t just numbers to Holohan. They were a story he read to us nightly, of a battle we were fighting. Dispatches from the frontline of an emergency. And when the tide of battle began to turn and we started to win against the virus, no one seemed more relieved than him.
Some — not very many — had knowledge of his wife’s illness. The rest of us have only now learned that our chief medical officer wasn’t just trying to keep the country safe these past months. He was also involved in a deeply personal, private battle at home.
As #ThankYouTony began to trend on social media, the most common response was ‘How?’ How did he manage to do the job he did, to stand in front of us every evening with the air of a man who had just one thing on his mind — our safety and the protection of our health? When all the while there was another huge demand on his time and energy and focus.
I know a bit — enough — about cancer. At one point, while I was being treated in 2016, I wrote that “it isn’t just you who is diagnosed with cancer, it’s your whole family”, because of the way cancer, and treatment for it, pulls families into its slipstream.
There is a lot of physical dependency — weakness, nausea and fatigue that mean you can do very little for yourself. There is also, or certainly was for me, a lot of psychological dependency. A need for reassurance from the people you love. Those around you become carers, minders, watchers, as well as cooks, chauffeurs, housekeepers and so on. There is a huge emotional burden placed on them to be strong and positive and cheerful all the times that you, the patient, cannot. Cancer takes from everyone.
I don’t see how it can have been much different for Tony Holohan. And I salute him for being able, and willing, to give so much of himself to a public crisis, when he will also have been giving so much to his family’s private troubles.
Not everyone agreed with his every pronouncement. There have been dissenting voices —rightly so, in a democracy — but not one has doubted his sincerity, or the very obvious fact that he cared deeply about what became of us all. He was a man doing his best. Possibly he was too cautious for some, particularly when the immediate threat receded. As we emerged gradually from lockdown, his was the voice still calling for restraint. Too much restraint, we might have felt at times. Often, when that happens, when a wilful crowd is being held back from doing what they want by a figure of authority, the crowd will turn hostile. They will tear down the authority figure in order to permit themselves the freedoms they want.
‘We let him be the boundary against which some of us pushed’
That didn’t happen with Tony Holohan. The crowd may have been frustrated by a lack of absolute clarity. There was sometimes a citing of the protocols in other countries in order to question the validity of ours, but even the dissenters remained respectful, or the vast majority of them anyway.
If anything, I’m not sure we didn’t take comfort from that very caution, even while expressing our frustration; knowing that with Holohan at his post, there was no chance reckless dispensations would be granted. We let him be the boundary against which some of us pushed.
Assessments of how Ireland has handled Covid-19 are really only just beginning. There is plenty of reckoning still to come as we try and get to grips fully with what happened, what we did about what happened, and what the implications of that doing are. But one thing is for sure though, we are grateful for the strength, clarity and conviction Tony Holohan displayed throughout.
We don’t need to look far for a vision of what vacillating and careless leadership looks like. It isn’t pretty. All the more reason to say: thank you, Tony.