Irish Examiner view: Are there any lessons we should learn from covid?

Covid leaks

Matt Hancock was health secretary at the time of the covid crisis and appeared on 'I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here' having been the subject of a controversy during restrictions.

What, if anything, could we possibly learn in Ireland from the Gilbertian scenarios which have emerged over the water from a former minister’s inspired decision to hand over thousands of Whatsapp messages to a journalist who he hoped would ghost write a favourable and reputation-enhancing biography about his handling of the covid-19 pandemic?

That those messages set out in cringeworthy detail the bloated sense of arrogance and disregard that political leaders and administrators have for their voters in a country which has had the same party in power for too long should not surprise us. 

That the politician in question was Matt Hancock, health secretary at the time of the crisis until his indiscreet philandering and disregard of social distancing was caught on office CCTV, is even less of a shock. 

And that the man https://www.irishexaminer.com/world/arid-41058122.htmlwho demonstrated an ability to eat cooked camel penis in I’m a Celebrity was a leader of the lockdown clique which affected the lives of millions of people completes the three-card trick.

Willie Walsh, former CEO of Aer Lingus and British Airways, and now director general of the International Air Transport Association is right when he described the “breathtaking contempt” for passengers revealed in exchanges between Hancock and Simon Case, then British cabinet secretary, and another public official who emerges very poorly from the cache of messages handed across to the journalist Isabel Oakeshott for the book Pandemic Diaries. 

She subsequently passed them to the Daily Telegraph which has been drip feeding revelations all week.

Mr Walsh said: “Airlines were rightly questioning the scientific rationale for the stop-start testing and quarantine measures which caused misery for millions.

“We were inundated with heart-breaking stories of families kept apart by the cruel and unjustified quarantines.

“While ministers joked on Whatsapp and had parties at Number 10, travel and tourism businesses went to the wall and hundreds of thousands of jobs were put at risk.

“Lives and livelihoods meant nothing to these people.” 

He adds that it is essential Britain’s covid inquiry, which is slowly under way in comparison to zero progress other than promises in Ireland, gets to the bottom of the reasons why science was captured politically and ensures that the necessary lessons are learned before the next crisis.

This is precisely the point. 

One lesson that can already be drawn is that the great tendency to conduct political business by mobile phone and text messages has inherent dangers, not least in failing to capture the record of how decisions are reached in a democracy. 

Ireland has had its own controversies in such matters, and it will be disappointing if more of them emerge when our own covid review finally gets on the road instead of being a rather woolly pledge.