The Irish Examiner View: Policy failure highlighted in a new way

Anyone who works, or at least until recently worked, in an office, a factory or a school setting, others too, will be familiar with fire drills. These are intended to ensure that in the event of a fire chaos and panic might be averted and that buildings would be evacuated safely. The hope must be that the need to test these preparations remains remote but some of us, almost inevitably, will someday face that challenge.

It may be glib to compare the impact of coronavirus to an everyday fire drill but it may be worthwhile especially as the pandemic has exposed vulnerabilities that would not exist in an ideal world. We do not, and we never will, live in an ideal world but that should not deter us from learning obvious lessons around what eventually happens when reality is, for whatever reasons, consistently denied. That some of these these lessons might be applied without reinventing the wheel or breaking the bank adds the weight of commonsense to that argument.

The huge reduction in harmful emissions from transport and the positive impact that fall had immediately had on air quality is one. The loss of an as yet unknown number of jobs in aviation or tourism, probably in the high hundreds of thousands, is the negative side of that equation.

So too is the exposure of vulnerabilities embedded in the for-profit system we use to care for people who have surrendered independence to age. These may have been the unpredictable consequences of an unexpected challenge but there entirely predictable consequences too. Tottering edifices fall; responses unequal to the challenge they are supposed to resolve implode; sticking-plaster solutions, usually an evasion of one obligation or another, fall short.

One example is how one government after another ignored one report after another on how third-level education might be funded. The consequence of that dodging is pressing on our universities. They have become so dependent on international students and high fees they bring that should they not come here to study because of the pandemic then very hard decisions around what can or cannot be funded loom.

The direct provision system used to accommodate refugees is another. Anyone who cares to see realises that it is not fit for purpose, maybe deliberately so if recent allegations from Labour's Aodhán Ó Ríordáin stand. It is by and large indefensibly inadequate.

In something approaching the irony of the year so far, a legal opinion drafted for the Irish Refugee Council (IRC) points out that the State is in conflict with emergency pandemic legislation when residents in accommodation centres, because of crowding, are unable to observe social distancing or self-isolating regulations.

That advice also points out that DP seem to "directly contradict" State guidelines and seem "markedly different" to the approach in homeless emergency accommodation which is contrary to its obligations in respect of non-discrimination.