Yesterday, in London, Boris Johnson issued a generalised apology for any and all mistakes that the British Government, under his leadership, made during the covid-19 pandemic. Per the Daily Telegraph, he said the following:
The former prime minister said: “Can I just say how glad I am to be here at this inquiry, and how sorry I am for the pain and the loss and the suffering.”
Mr Johnson went on: “Can I say that I understand the feelings of the victims and their families, and I am deeply sorry for the pain and the loss and the suffering of those victims and their families.
“And grateful though I am to the hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers and many other public servants and many other walks of life that helped to protect our country throughout a dreadful pandemic I do hope that this inquiry will help to get the answers to the very difficult questions that those victims and those families are rightly asking so that we can protect ourselves better, help each other to protect ourselves better and prevent further suffering.”
The existence and tone of Britain’s covid enquiry reveals the sharp divides between the United Kingdom and Ireland in matters of politics and political culture. In recent months, Irish politicians have been almost uniform in their assertions that a covid enquiry will happen at some stage, but that it will not be adversarial or focus on individuals. Which is a nice way of saying that one purpose of any such enquiry will be to actively avoid blaming any individual for specific policy decisions or errors. By and large, nobody seems to really mind this. Or at least, nobody loud enough to matter.
That Ireland and the United Kingdom have very differing attitudes to the role of their leaders during a crisis is not new: One need only compare the Irish General Election of 1944 with the UK General Election of 1945. In both cases, leaders who were perceived to have done a good job during the second world war were on the ballot. In Ireland, the voters rewarded Eamon DeValera with nine additional seats and an increased majority. In the UK, Winston Churchill was turfed out on his ear by the very people he’d just led to a victory that seemed more than unlikely on the day he first took office.
It might be argued in Ireland, we feel a much closer and more personal attachment to our politicians than they do in Britain. Perhaps – and I can feel nationalist fingers twitching as I write this – it is because in Britain, the Royal Family accrues most of the personal attachment and loyalty of people, which allows politicians to be seen more for what they are: A disposable tool.
There’s another thing, too: the Irish predisposition to identifying with the state as almost an extension of our national identity: This is a very powerful tool for the Government, particularly in moments of national crisis. Nobody ever talks, even in general conversation, about how the Irish Government did during covid-19. People will instead talk about how Ireland did, as if the Government’s decisions were collectively agreed by a kind of national psychic osmosis. In that sense, criticism of the Government is felt – even by people who would not vote for the Government – as criticism of the country. There’s a vague sense that criticising the state or its functionaries, like Dr. Holohan, might be vaguely unpatriotic.
There’s another reason why the Irish Government can get away without holding what might be called an “adversarial” style of enquiry: It is that the Irish Government managed to achieve overwhelming majority support during Covid-19 for almost everything it did. Yes, there are many people in Ireland who remain deeply sore over things like Vaccine Passports or the treatment of nursing homes, but even as their numbers grow, they grow to include many people who supported those policies without question at the time. If it were to transpire for example that Dr. Holohan was wrong about something major, then it would follow inevitably that maybe the 60% or 70% of the country who instinctively and tribally agreed with him were also wrong. And nobody wants to hear that they were wrong.
In Britain, the attitude is somewhat different: You follow Government and official advice, certainly. But if that advice turns out to have been wrong, then those who issued it are held to account with very little mercy. Similarly, the British determination to punish hypocrisy – vis a vis, for example, the Downing Street parties – is simply not something that is a feature of Irish politics.
One of the things that is often hardest for people with dissident views in Ireland to accept is that by and large, this country’s politics and political culture reflects almost entirely the collective view of the Irish people on how a country should be run. Recently, a reporter with a UK outlet told me of how one of his colleagues, newly in the country and unfamiliar with how things are done here, shouted a question at a senior politician in the way his UK colleagues customarily do in Britain – of the “Prime Minister, will you resign?!” variety. The response of Irish journalists was, he related, one of utmost horror.
We don’t treat our politicians like that here, for better, or for worse.
Which is one reason that we’ll never have an enquiry like the one they’re having across the water.