Irish Examiner View: Restrictions must apply to everyone

The huge gap in responsibilities between those who advise and those who are forced to decide on one issue or another was laid bare again yesterday.

Science had the luxury of being disinterested but politicians, trying to keep an implausible number of balls in the air, did not have that luxury.

Science, through Cillian De Gascun, chairman of the coronavirus expert advisory group, warned that there can be no easy, quick resumption of a “normal state of affairs”.

He was speaking before Covid-19 restrictions on commercial and social activities were unavoidably extended.

“Given the opportunity this virus will run rampant,” he warned, saying that over the next five to seven days he hoped testing rates will increase dramatically as additional laboratory capacity comes on stream.

The detail of how many people await a test or how many tests are being carried out each day were not shared. This is unfortunate as an information deficit is in many ways as dangerous as misinformation.

Transparency is always the best policy no matter how grim the data. It is also one of the expressions of trust necessary when a society like this is asked to accept exceptional disciplines — even if they are for our own good.

The same information was reviewed by politicians but even if they reached the very same conclusions they, because they cannot be disinterested, focused on a different aspect.

Rather than concentrate on limited testing they looked ahead to the possibilities that improved, wider, faster testing might usher in. With those improvements, official sources hinted, restrictions might be eased next month.

This line of good cop-bad cop communication is necessary as pressure to ease the restrictions is increasing. Escalating and unexpected costs — human and economic — and a sharper sense at Cabinet level that the economy cannot be kept in neutral indefinitely add to the pressure.

So too is the fear that co-operation with the lockdown, so far more or less successful, is finite.

The current restrictions started on Friday, March 27. They mandate that everyone should stay at home, only leaving to:

• Shop for essential food and household goods;
• Attend medical appointments, collect medicine or other health products;
• Care for children, older people or other vulnerable people - this excludes social family visits;
• Exercise outdoors - within 2kms of your home and only with members of your own household, keeping 2 metres distance between you and other people
• Travel to work if you provide an essential service - be sure to practice physical distancing

Rather than bend to that pressure, rather than accept that lockdown measures have a limited shelf life even if a reckless, indifferent minority imagine it so, Government should have the confidence to be as forceful as is necessary to maintain the disciplines that the great majority of people have accepted and observe every stay-at-home day.

Better to be unpopular with that minority today than to be counting bodies in a month’s time and having to explain why sanctions that seemed to be working were cast aside prematurely. It really is that black or white, that simple.

One sanction that seems to be working is the garda operation to deter people going to holiday homes. Traffic on all the main routes out of Dublin dropped dramatically late on Thursday.

It will be interesting to see if any of those who visited holiday homes are, when they try to return to their main home, told to return to their dacha and stay there.