The ‘Independent Covid-19 Evaluation’ has shared an update on its work so far, and the limited picture it paints nevertheless appears overwhelmingly negative, offering a reminder of why any sort of official Covid retrospective would have been much more useful if it had been given any sort of enforcement power.
But no, lest those who were in the driving seats (many of whom, of course, remain in the driving seats) feel antagonised, the State opted for a “non-adversarial” approach, one that is future-facing and primarily concerned with “lessons learned,” and most certainly not with finger pointing or apportioning blame.
There are a number of avenues the evaluation team is pursuing, among which was a public consultation where respondents could share their “lived experiences” of the pandemic in their own words. It closed mid-July after receiving over 7,000 responses, and the update provided is based on the partial examination of a number of the early responses.
Here are the extremely limited findings they offer, which probably tells us all that we need to know about the wider contents:
High levels of negative impacts are emerging, in preliminary findings, across education & development; civil liberties, human rights & trust; and mental health. Those who reported difficulty in making ends meet reported considerably wider negative impacts across many dimensions. Early findings also suggest mental health strains overall were most concerned with issues such as COVID-19 exposure and loneliness or isolation.
Education, particularly social development, is presenting as a significant issue for parents/guardians in the initial analysis. Students are highlighting challenges around meaningful engagement with peers and extracurricular activities.
It’s very little, but it’s very revealing, and what it reveals is a public sense, five years on, of failure across the board. “High levels” of negative impact are emerging in almost every key area: education and development; civil liberties; human rights and trust; mental health; the disproportionate impact on the financially vulnerable; loneliness and isolation.
A ‘Nursing Homes Insights Workshop’ was also held in June, and the main feedback we’re given access to is, again, condemnatory. Among the views shared was that the pandemic response “internally and externally was very poor in nursing homes, particularly in the early stages, with multiple problems highlighted”.
One participant took issue ‘Terms of Reference’ for the Evaluation, specifically with its exclusively future-facing outlook, suggesting rather that it needs to “thoroughly evaluate the systemic and other failures that occurred in the sector to adequately plan for the future”.
“Wider issues relating to a system of neglect were also highlighted by one participant, including the area being chronically under-researched, lacking a coherent national policy framework and underfunded, with significant investment required. One of the participants also noted that nursing homes present complex issues around human rights, which are not simple to address,” the evaluation’s post reads.
Of most interest to me, among those responses, is the critique that the evaluation is “rooted in the future,” which is contrasted with thoroughly evaluating “the systemic and other failures”.
That anonymous contributor is entirely correct in their criticism, and would that they’d been put in charge of giving the evaluation its mandate. The form given to the process is one specifically designed to be shrugged off, the fear that the authorities would be found to have mismanaged the country during the pandemic palpable in any statements related to the matter of an inquiry made since we left those days behind us.
What will also be of great interest, at some point in the future, will be whatever information we’re given access to that’s contained in the approximately 500 documents turned over by 18 Government departments and the HSE to the evaluation team, which “reveal much about how the State responded to the pandemic: how issues were identified, how decisions were taken, and what factors informed and influenced those decisions”.
“They reveal the over-riding imperative of public health considerations, and the level of influence that NPHET advice had on government decisions and measures introduced. They also show how the response evolved and changed over time, from the initial emergency response with short-term measures, through to the more medium and longer-term response as the pandemic progressed and the challenges evolved,” the update reads.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the pandemic was an uncommonly strange time, when the desire to flatten the curve and keep it flat flattened everything else, and when governance of the country, in many ways, was dictated by an unelected body of officials and impulsive political reaction to social media videos showing slightly too many people standing next to each other.
Mistakes were made, and it’s a great injustice that in looking to the future and avoiding controversy, we’re essentially choosing to erase the wrongs of the past. While the evaluation’s findings are and undoubtedly will be interesting, I’m not exactly sure what they’re for. If the State can gloss over its findings now, it can sure as hell gloss over them again the next time a national emergency raises its head.
The only way to stop that is by ensuring that there will be consequences for doing so. Unfortunately, this evaluation very much seems to be no bark and no bite.