Mandatory Hotel Quarantine was introduced in Ireland at the start of 2021 as part of a Government strategy to help get the country back to normal. Six months on, the policy has completely failed, because Ireland remains the most restricted country in Europe.
The policy was introduced, let us not forget, on the basis of a particular set of promises. Here, at the time, was Fianna Fáil TD, Christopher O’Sullivan:
Cork South West TD Christopher O’Sullivan is calling on government to adopt the same measures that are in place in New Zealand and Australia, where all arrivals are quarantined in hotels.
“Increasingly we’re seeing images and video of people in New Zealand enjoying concerts, social gatherings and experiencing a fair degree of normality,” O’Sullivan said.
This was, of course, the universal argument: That by restricting travel into Ireland, we could reduce and eliminate the need for lockdowns and restrictions. On this basis, mandatory quarantine was lauded by experts such as the Independent Scientific Advocacy Group, Politicians from most parties, and a big chunk of the media. As yesterday proved, every single one of them got it wrong.
The problem of course was always obvious. New Zealand and Australia, the two most prominent westernised countries to adopt the policy, are islands, thousands of miles from other countries. Ireland, by contrast, is an island divided into two countries. Restricting travel onto the island was never in the gift of the Irish Government to begin with.
That the policy has failed cannot be in dispute. No argument that can be made in its defence can escape the central fact that the policy was put in place to enable the country to re-open and enjoy the benefits of a lockdown-free summer. In the name of this objective, the Irish state locked people in hotels for weeks, often in very tragic circumstances. People were forbidden from seeing their dying relatives. In one case, a woman was actually prevented from leaving the country – not entering it – to see a dying relative. These “hard cases”, we were told, were difficult, but necessary to secure freedom for the majority.
Where, then, is that freedom?
And why, given the utter failure of the policy to achieve its central aim, is it still in place?
The answer to the second question, of course, is a tale as old as time. Whenever any Government initiative fails, admitting failure is avoided by redefining what the objectives were to begin with. Ask a Government Minister now what the point of Mandatory Quarantine is, and they will tell you it is a key tool in our battle against the dreaded Delta Variant, and that it has worked to keep cases low. Both are unproven, and unprovable, assertions.
Every single promise, in fact, of the “Zero Covid” lobby has now been broken, or proved to be false. The basic idea was always that stricter restrictions than every other country would ultimately lead to a faster re-opening than every other country. Strange, then, that these paragons of expertise did not anticipate the danger of the variants that now have them reverse-ferreting on that logic faster than they can agree to join Claire Byrne to discuss those same variants. Had the country embraced the Zero Covid position completely, and totally, it would now be in precisely the same position, if not worse, than the one in which it finds itself.
On mandatory quarantine, however, the case is clear: The policy was supposed to accomplish something specific, in giving Ireland the security to re-open like New Zealand and Australia. Not quite normally, of course – we would still have been a closed, bottled, sanitized country free from the malign influence of foreigners and their diseases (that’s sarcasm, by the way) – but certainly on a par with our antipodean cousins. That has not come to pass, which means the policy has failed.
There is no justification whatever for keeping it in place. Those who defend it are practicing that most dishonest of political arts: Pretending that they made a different argument all along. They did not.