Fergus Finlay: Last orders for pubs that cannot obey coronavirus rules

We must stop listening to nonsense from people whose expertise is in the business of special pleading on behalf of vested interests

Pubs that flout the Covid-19 rules should be shut by the authorities.

We’ve got to get a grip. It’s time for the reckless and the irresponsible to be shut down. There should be no second chances for pubs and other venues that can’t obey the rules. When they’re caught, they should simply be closed by the authorities and their licences to trade automatically suspended.

And it should happen in a way that puts the onus of proof firmly on them to establish that they can ever again be trusted in the future. An awful lot of these places hire bouncers to keep people they regard as undesirable out. There’s enough evidence now to suggest that some undesirables are in charge of some venues.

And it’s time for some of the “experts” to give us all a break from their whinging and moaning. There was an article in The Irish Times last week under the heading ‘New Zealand’s decision to close down business in Auckland over four Covid-19 cases is madness’. It was written by a business journalist.

The Sunday Times had another, also written by an economics columnist, calling on us to follow the Swedish approach. Sweden — twice our population, a much more highly developed health and social care system, and three times our number of deaths. More people will die, of course, but the economic effects won’t be as bad.

And the Sunday Independent ran an interview with another expert, Stanford University’s professor of medicine, that the “lockdown will prove the biggest public health mistake in history”. It’s not clear why — did we save too many lives, or not enough?

Of course, there are people in the media who are asking critical questions, as they should, who are reporting mistakes, who are building evidence to support an argument. But I really don’t know what all this other nonsense is designed to achieve. Is it to make us feel stupid? Or are the writers just cleverer or more superior than the rest of us?

I’m not writing this as someone connected with the HSE, although I have a connection. I’m certainly not pretending to be an expert in public health, though I’ve tried hard to learn who to trust and who not to trust.

I’m writing this as a citizen, a husband, a father, and a grandfather. As a grandfather, for example, I know from the mouths of my grandkids how important it is for them to go back to school, and how devastated they will be if it doesn’t happen.

As a husband, my wife, one of the fittest and most active people I know, had to be tested for Covid-19 last week. She had some symptoms, and the whole process, from referral to result, took four days. It was a long four days.

I knew if she tested positive she could have a very rough time ahead of her.

I also know that if she got it, so almost certainly would I, as would our daughter Mandy. All three of us, for several reasons, are in the category described as vulnerable. All of us have taken as much care as possible, and have tried to follow the public health advice as well as we can.

If Frieda had tested positive — thankfully, she just had a bad cold — it would have been one of those unlucky things that was no fault of hers. But almost certainly the statistics would have gone up by three.

That’s one side of it. The other side is that I know, from direct experience and involvement, that the HSE, at every single level, pulled off a miracle when the pandemic arrived in Ireland.

There is no country in Europe less well prepared than we are for a pandemic. That’s simply because public policy for years neglected health and social care. Beds removed from the system 40 years ago have never been appropriately replaced. Elderly care was systematically privatised and is now largely run on a for-profit basis. So is a great deal of acute care and diagnostics.

Services for people with a disability, which were never “top of mind” in the first place, were farmed out to very large voluntary providers which have grown enormously top-heavy over the years. Those same services, almost without exception, shut down as completely as they could the minute the pandemic started, and left the people who need them high and dry.

And, of course, the HSE itself has long been regarded by people the length and breadth of the country as a huge, unresponsive, inefficient, bureaucratic monster.

Almost since the day it was founded the most commonly held view of the HSE was that you got great service and care in an Irish public hospital, but access to that care (getting into hospital in good time when you needed it) was a disaster.

By any measure, then, Ireland was guaranteed to be overrun when the pandemic hit.

But we weren’t, and there were two reasons for that. The first is that doctors, nurses, ward orderlies, cleaners, managers — everyone in the system — went to work. They went to work in fear of their health and their lives, but they didn’t let that stop them.

And the second reason is that we, the rest of us, took the business of looking after each other seriously. We helped to ensure that our health system wasn’t overrun by washing our hands, by sacrificing some of the things we call good times, by learning different ways to do the things we needed to do.

Those two great strengths are now our greatest weaknesses.

In the first place, our health system cannot sustain a second surge. That’s just a fact. We have never had enough beds to cope with any winter epidemic, and if we have a bad flu season alongside a second surge, the trolley crisis of the last few years, that always dominated our news bulletins, will be like a picnic.

Hundreds of people will die. Your loved ones and mine.

And secondly, there’s too much evidence now that too many of us are tired of it. You see it everywhere.

Even though mask-wearing is improving, there are still too many people throwing caution to the winds too often. There’s too much talk about “impositions on our rights and freedoms”. Too many people are going to ignore the flu jab when it comes available — which should be as mandatory as possible, by the way.

WE HAVE to recognise that every time we go into a confined space without a mask, every time we stand too close with a pint in our hands, we’re playing with someone’s health.

We have to recognise that this isn’t just a temporary thing. It’s a permanent change we have to make in all our lifestyles until this pandemic is beaten.

We’ve got to stop listening to nonsense from people whose expertise is really in the business of special pleading on behalf of vested interests.

I know that’s not the message everyone wants to hear. I know government ministers want to encourage rather than coerce.

But the numbers are going the wrong way now. It’s not too late to turn them around again. We’ve got to get a grip.