The meaningful Christmas we were allowed will cost this Coalition dearly

Micheál Martin should have learned lessons of his smoking ban’s success and kept up restrictions

THE outstanding miscalculation of this Coalition was acting on the pledge to provide a ‘meaningful Christmas’. What moves the misstep into the arena of gross negligence is that the strategy began unravelling very early – yet nobody in Government shouted stop in time.

Incredibly, more Irish people have tested positive for Covid in January 2021 than in the entirety of 2020. Deaths have also spiralled this past month.

And this is not early revisionism. Our children’s continued absence from school, with no scheduled return date; skyrocketing death numbers; and a vigorously renewed full lockdown are all a direct result of the meaningful Christmas. With Health Minister Stephen Donnelly’s vaccine strategy descending into tragi-comedy, we are now at the self-inflicted nadir of Covid. And this Government will pay.

In the middle of January, Micheál Martin said that in ‘hindsight’ he wouldn’t have relaxed restrictions coming up to Christmas, but qualified it, saying ‘nobody predicted, in any model, the level of community transmission that we’re currently experiencing’.

However, figures and events did foreshadow what happened, and whereas hindsight is redundant foresight is required of a Government.

Here’s what really happened. On October 29, 2020, Taoiseach Martin pledged that Ireland would have a ‘meaningful Christmas’, and an inflexible strategy was locked in. On that day there were 863 new Covid cases. We were already in a six-week lockdown.

MANY restrictions were lifted from December 1, as the country moved from Level 5 of Covid restrictions to Level 3, as the State prepared for a gradual easing of the grinding constraints on normal life. The day before the fateful reopening of bars and restaurants, December 3, cases had fallen to 162.

Such has been the confusing rapidity of lifting and reimposition of restrictions it should also be noted that hotels, cinemas and gyms opened up at this time. But, in a pivotal move, non-essential retail also opened. From early December the population was free to move from bar to restaurant to shopping mall, it was indeed a combustible mix. I recall at the time, repeatedly singing the line from the old Squeeze song to myself: ‘The devil came and took me, from bar to street to bookie.’

A week later, December 10, cases had nearly doubled to 303. Then, on December 18, a week before a Christmas Day anticipated like no other, cases had increased ominously to 576. On this day did the Government shout ‘Hold on! This is not going well’? No, it decided to forge ahead with the mad plan that had been locked in the month before. On December 18, all shackles came off and households were permitted to mix with two other households. And inter-county travel was permitted. A Government statement had also stressed that inter-county travel applied to the northern six counties, the restriction of moving into the Covid petri dish of Ulster was also removed.

All the while, largely unihibited travel from the UK and the rest of the world had, of course, continued oblivious to the pandemic.

Then, the day after our full intercounty travel was lifted, December 19, the UK government confirmed that a new, hyper-infectious strain of Covid-19 had been discovered. A 48-hour ban on travel from Britain was imposed from December 21. This may seem a quick reaction, but in the maw of a pandemic not quick enough. Thousands travelled by traditional routes from Britain between December 19 and 21. Of course, these returnees had been moving around Ireland. They continued to come unimpeded through Belfast, and of course, the rest of the world could come.

And, with extraordinary ineptitude, Ireland’s Covid-free nirvana lived on. On December 22, the Cabinet announced that pubs and restaurants would close on Christmas Eve and inter-county travel would continue until St Stephen’s Day (and even this had grey areas). Mr Martin said the Government had acted ‘quickly and aggressively’.

I suggest they did the opposite, and should not have been in this position in the first place.

FROM 576 new cases on December 18, we had 766 on December 20 and 961 on December 22, the day the Cabinet decided to backtrack. Still, on December 23 there were 927 new cases, 918 on Christmas Eve and we finally broke the 1,000 barrier on Christmas Day with 1,025. On St Stephen’s Day, as the roads filled with the homeward bound there were 1,296 new Covid cases in Ireland. On January 8, Ireland’s figures hit 8,227, a damning indictment from which this Coalition – cobbled together to combat Covid – will struggle to recover.

The aftershocks of those disastrous errors mean that we are now facing reactive restrictions on travel and quarantine that we were repeatedly assured were impossible. That they have been introduced now, without liaison with the gardaí or a timetable for required legislation displays a Government in headlong panic.

The cold figures are damning enough, but what they don’t show is how completely disconnected this Government is from the people it represents. An understanding of our culture did not seem to play a role in this telescoped lifting of restrictions. Ireland has a unique relationship with Christmas founded in our unusual blend of cultures.

We have a laudable Roman Catholic elevation of family and social interaction, similar to that found in Spain and Italy. Yet we also have a drinking culture, common to that found across Europe’s northern fringe. We have a history of emigration dating back to the 1830s – this means we have a seasonal repatriation of emigrés, concentrated in December. Thrown into the already heady mix of reopened hospitality, expanded household visits and unshuttered retail was continued uninhibited foreign travel until days before Christmas. The results were undeniably ruinous.

NPHET pre-emptively understood some of this, though it did not loudly shout stop either. That group advised the Government last November to open up the hospitality sector OR loosen household visits.

In commanding an opening up of Ireland last December, Micheál Martin forgot a lesson he must have learned from what remains the outstanding achievement of his long political career – the smoking ban.

Before Mr Martin’s smoking ban, which has been aped internationally, I recall sitting in bars, restaurants, buses and newsrooms where No Smoking signs were routinely flouted. Not, however, after it was made illegal.

An expectation that a population not push the limits of loosened restrictions was deeply unwise. It was a recklessly ill-thought out and out of touch decision by a Government understandably cracking under the pressures of an international pandemic.

And the ‘meaningful Christmas’ of 2020 will go down as one of the greatest political errors of modern Irish history.