Fergus Finlay: The going may get very tough — but we’ve been here before

Ministers Heather Humphreys and Helen McEntee at Dublin Airport where they met with people arriving from Ukraine. Picture: Maxwells

WHERE has our resilience gone? How come we seem to have suddenly lost the ability to pull together? Have we just used it all up, just got exhausted?

I’m asking because suddenly I can hardly bear to open a newspaper or turn on the radio or television these days, so loud is the whinging and moaning. Farmers, truck drivers, motorists of all sorts — either they or their spokespeople are at it morning noon and night. Everything is a failure in the eyes of opposition and so-called independent politicians — not just a failure, but a colossal one at that. The next time I hear one of those opposition people saying that the Government “just don’t get it”, I’ll throw something at the television.

Subsidies for this, take Vat off that — the message all the time is that the Government isn’t doing enough, will never do enough. The day the Government knocked €300 and odd million off the price of petrol, all you could hear was “is that it?” “That’s the best you can do?” Anyone who knows me knows I don’t carry any torch for the Government. But anyone with an ounce of fairness in them knows it has been battling against something entirely unprecedented for two years and more now. And although it’s not over — not by a long shot — something just as bad, with the potential to develop into something catastrophic, appears around the corner.

If the start of the pandemic was a time for us to pull together, then by every bit of logic in the world so is this.

It’s Patrick’s Day this week, a moment (we hope) when we can celebrate pride in an immense achievement. It’s two years ago since Leo Varadkar, the then taoiseach, announced the first lockdown and talked to us in a pretty measured way about the gravity of the situation Covid-19 was presenting. I remember thinking at the time that it was good to have a taoiseach who treated the people who elected him like responsible adults.

We knuckled down immediately. There was, in the first week or so, a bit of panic-buying, but only of toilet paper. We all remember the sight of trolleys piled high with loo rolls and even people fighting over them. One study I read at the time said they were trying to get to the bottom of why people were so concerned about number one when it came to number twos. Too many bad puns, and no real explanation!

Pulling together

Once we got past the initial panic — and that didn’t take long — our little country pulled together. We had good advice and we followed it. We had decent, honest leadership and we supported it. We had good management of all the key systems in place — the kind of management that might make you wonder why it’s not like this all the time — and we let them get on with the work. While we tried, as hard as we could, to look after each other.

And the result is to be found in a study published this week in The Lancet, one of the most reputable science/medical magazines in the world. People died in Ireland during and because of the pandemic. Death was lonely, heart-breaking. Families were devastated by the inability to comfort and protect.

But as a country, we — all of us — did far better than most.

The Lancet study set out to measure excess mortality due to Covid-19 — in a way, to count the number of people who wouldn’t have died if it wasn’t for the pandemic. Across the world, it found that in every 100,000 of the population, 120 people died of Covid.

Compare that figure of 120 with some of the countries really badly hit. Just some at random from across Europe: Hungary 297. Slovenia 179. Austria 107. Germany 120. Sweden 91. UK 127. Spain 187. Italy 227. Some around the average, some frighteningly higher.

Now look at our figure: 13. 12.5 to be exact.

Over the period of the pandemic — and I repeat, it’s not over yet — Norway and Iceland had better figures than that. Nobody else. We, with our creaking, overstretched, and under-resourced health system, somehow managed to protect more people than almost any other country.

Someone somewhere did something right. That’s what resilience does. It’s what pulling together does. It’s what trying to understand and follow the science does. It saves lives. And it does it on a scale that we can always be proud of.

And now we need to do it again. In case I haven’t already said it, the pandemic isn’t over, and there are still a lot of people in danger from the way it can attack.

But alongside it right now there is a terrible war — not on our doorstep but not far away. And with the potential, just like the pandemic, to creep ever closer

Many of us, it seems to me, have risen to this new challenge in the most extraordinary way possible, with offers of help and refuge for terrified families, and as much support for the people of Ukraine as we can muster. There are more offers than the agencies can cope with — isn’t that amazing?

The only thing we know for sure, I reckon, is that this war will get a lot worse before it gets better. That sounds like a cliché, I know, but what it could mean is casualties in the tens of thousands, starvation and terror in the heart of Europe, and millions of displaced women and children, left to cope with unimaginable trauma.

And at the same time, the supplies of things we depend on — grain for bread, gas to heat our homes, fuel to run our cars — could get scarcer and scarcer and dearer and dearer.

We may find as this year goes on that we have to work harder at protecting our families from different types of disadvantage and protecting our neighbours — especially any that are frail — from deprivation. We may find our hard-earned savings being depleted. The going may get very tough.

But we’ve been here before. If all that happens, of course we’ll need wise political leadership. Of course we’ll need to deploy whatever resources we have to wherever they’re needed. Of course hard choices will have to be made.

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But we also know there’s only one way to get through it — more resilience, more community. We also know we can. If there are pieces to be picked up afterwards, we can do that too.

Like I said, I’m not a card-carrying Government supporter. I’m pretty certain, though, it is not to blame for what’s happening now, and I’m pretty certain it’ll work as hard as possible to get us through.

Which is why this is the worst possible moment to have to listen to the blame game being played out on the media. We need desperately to get beyond the instinct to start whinging and moaning that it’s all the Government’s fault. Normally I love the business of playing politics as much as the next person. Right now we need a much more grown-up brand of politics. Would that be too much to ask for?