Failure of leadership is chipping away at our national resolve

IN LIVING memory, there never has been a time when leadership was more needed. As we approach the one-year anniversary of the announcement of the first full national lockdown next Saturday, the clear feeling is that leadership now is lacking.

As we reveal today, the Oireachtas Covid Sub-Committee has not been convened for several weeks. In Cabinet, there have been grumbles that Covid has not been a constant on the agenda. This is happening at a time when, despite a threemonth lockdown, the third wave remains stubbornly robust at around 500 new cases a day.

A certain amount of this can be blamed on new variants of the disease. Lockdown fatigue, however, must be a serious factor in the failure to reduce the number of cases – people aren’t as compliant as they were.

Lockdown fatigue was clearly understood as a significant threat at the start of this crisis. The state’s first actions were to impose certain restrictions – closing schools, pubs and so on – because it feared that if it went to full lockdown too soon, compliance would be jeopardised.

Yet from our current Government we have a failure of leadership that chips away at our national resolve. Last week we reported queue-skipping by backroom office workers in the HSE who ought not to have received the vaccine. We also reported that vaccine programme head Professor Karina Butler suggested that extending the time between doses of AstraZeneca to 12 weeks could increase the number of first doses being administered. She was seemingly unaware that the

HSE was already doing this. Then AstraZeneca was pulled completely over fears it led to blood clotting, only to be reapproved for use days later.

Further eroding our spirit of national solidarity, in Stephen Donnelly we have a Health Minister who seems to think he talks a good game as he makes promises that simply cannot be kept, announces targets that cannot be met and raises more questions than he answers by occasionally jumping the gun before he is armed with the facts.

As the promise of liberation from the virus nears, the danger of less compliance grows.

So what happens if there is a fourth wave? We simply cannot lurch from lockdown to lockdown, because the nation’s mental health cannot take it. Few things have been as depressing as Deputy Chief Medical Officer Ronan Glynn this week asking us all to do ‘just a little bit more’. The people who need to hear that message are the very ones who will never heed it, while the compliant look on with heavy hearts as they’re told it will be well into summer before indoor dining, and maybe even household visits, are allowed.

This newspaper has attempted to be as fair as possible when evaluating the state’s response because we accepted it was territory unknown in our lifetimes and that there was no clear template to follow. A year into the crisis, that indulgence is wearing thin.

What we are seeing now is drift – there seems to be no credible plan to get us out of lockdown, no urgency about ramping up the vaccination programme and a continuing, and deeply worrying, inability to communicate consistent messaging of any consequence.

It is all very well for Dr Glynn to ask us to do more, but his supplication is misdirected. We have done everything, and more, that has been asked of us, even when it was contradictory.

There is one person who must do more, one person who can whip his troops into shape, make them sing from the same hymn sheet and instil in them the urgency needed to ensure we can safely mingle again. That person is An Taoiseach Micheál Martin. The buck stops there.