Joyce Fegan: We need a Covid exit roadmap instead of personal agendas
Dr Tony Holohan, Chief Medical Officer, Department of Health. The thing about medics having the authority to make big national decisions is they have no skin in the game, in that they have no agenda like popularity, the seeking of ministerial status or re-election.
Do you remember being in school and the clock would read 8.59am, and there'd be no sign of the teacher, then 9am, and still no sign of the múinteoir, and then 9.05am, and there was still no sign? As a child it felt exciting — this feeling that there was no adult coming, that you were authority-free.
It kind of feels like that now. Except we're a year into a global pandemic.
It feels like there is no one in charge.
During the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment from the Constitution, some research was carried out by those who sought to repeal the amendment, to see who the Irish public trusted most when it came to information and guidance on serious issues.
It was no longer the church, it wasn't the media and it was not politicians. Doctors were who the Irish public trusted the most.
A desire for gender balance in politics aside, most days I wish Tony Holohan was being driven around in a State car as the 15th Taoiseach of Ireland, and your man Michael Ryan, from the World Health Organisation, was the Tanáiste.
The deputy chief medical officer, Dr Ronan Glynn, could be the Minister for Health.
The thing about medics having the authority to make big national decisions is they have no skin in the game, in that they have no agenda like popularity, the seeking of ministerial status or re-election. Their only skin is the Hippocratic oath: primum non nocere — first, do no harm.
The sole, singular agenda of a doctor is to help, fix, heal. It's straightforward. There is no specialist advisor. They don't need spin doctors. They haven't 25 plates to keep spinning — just the one, our health
And in this incident, it happens to be all our health, the health of our nation.
Advice that Nphet has given has been created by science and fact. It's not opinion, and it considers only health and wellbeing, not economics.
Politicians have been given this information and been left in the position of having to balance the economy, people's livelihoods and the pushback from all of the lobby groups with what the science is saying.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather have forgone Christmas and the 54,000 people who flew into the State during the festive period
We are now living in this sort of suspended state of endlessness. We all joke about Groundhog Day in our WhatsApp groups and to our neighbours. We all laugh about how we have no news. And we're all walking the same loop, day in day out, for weeks on end now, with the prospect of doing the same for more weeks on end.
Christmas ended and we knuckled down for our ascetic punishment. Just as we'd made peace with this fact, parents around the country were informed that the schools were not reopening and creche was only for essential workers. It was a case of deja vu, except without the novelty of March 2020 and Roz Purcell's banana bread recipe.
We all managed to get through the dark days of January, especially those early days when Trump was still in the White House and our Covid case numbers were in their thousands daily. February 1, was on the horizon: spring, snowdrops, longer days. The vaccines were coming. There was hope.
Then came February 2, and 3, and 4, and the news that those who we were trying to keep safe, our citizens over 70 who had to cocoon last year, were not getting vaccinated just yet. This news was preceded by a delay in the vaccine roll-out, which got ironed out a bit, but then another blow for our over-70s.
Talk about taking the wind out the national sail.
We've been taking hit after hit, following the rules and it feels like a case of "to what end"? Is there an end in sight?
Last April and May, there were staycations to look forward to. Last November there was Christmas to look forward to. Now?
In Viktor Frankl's he looked at how people found hope in hopeless and chaotic situations. His situation was entirely different to the situation we now find ourselves in, he was in a Nazi concentration camp.
There is a part in the book where he says he could predict with near certainty which of his inmates was going to give up next. Despite the awful direness of life in camp, most people hoarded some treasure — half a biscuit or one cigarette. When he saw his fellow inmate smoking that cigarette or eating that biscuit he knew he would find them dead, having just given up all hope, the next morning. He was rarely wrong.
Fortunately, we are far, far removed from a concentration camp. But there is a sense of hopelessness and endlessness in the air that is palpable. No one has any news, and few people have plans, because you just never know. Last year we were nïave, now we know how this virus rolls.
While it feels at times that there is no one in charge, it also feels like you're just behaving really, really well, waiting for someone in charge to give you the green light to live like normal again.
We have people over 70 who really abide by the rules and who want to move around with some sense of safety, not with three masks on while traversing their 5k. We have parents working their socks off, managing Seesaw, tantrums and screen-use guilt, while navigating narrow footpaths in their 5k with scooting toddlers and buggies. We've young people missing crucial years from their lives and frontline workers keeping all our essential systems in a functional state.
Can an elected official draw up a map, maybe even a Plan A, best-case scenario, and a Plan B and a Plan C, just so we all have some sense that we're going somewhere with all these sacrifices we are making.
Can we have a roadmap please?
We need a plan and we need people in charge, who will take charge.
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