It may be belated, but the Taoiseach’s confirmation on Wednesday that he has nominated academic Anne Scott to chair the Government’s proposed evaluation committee reviewing the State’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic is still welcome. Preparation for the evaluation is expected to commence within weeks.
Ireland lags behind the international curve when it comes to analysing one of the greatest crises it has faced. It is essential that the State should learn as much as possible from that experience in order to prepare for future challenges.
The very words “evaluation committee” say a lot about Simon Harris and his Government colleagues’ eagerness to ensure that the process is as low-key and non-confrontational as possible. There are good reasons for this; the example of the UK, where a parliamentary inquiry descended into an unseemly and unproductive exercise in political point-scoring, probably figured in their calculations. Even more salient would have been Ireland’s sorry history of tribunals and inquiries into matters of grave public concern. Given the endless litigation, extraordinary costs and unacceptable lengths of time these took to complete in the past, a different approach is understandable.
Still, there will be criticism that the proposed process is toothless and insufficiently independent. Scott and her fellow members on the evaluation panel will have no legal powers, and individuals may decline to participate. The secretariat for the evaluation will be drawn from the ranks of the Civil Service. That will inevitably give rise to suggestions that public servants will be judging their own performance.
In the years since the outbreak of Covid-19 there has been much debate, some of it well-informed and some deeply misleading, on the strengths and weaknesses of the public health strategy it prompted. One advantage of the leisurely pace at which this evaluation has been launched is that there is now much more data available from which conclusions may be drawn. There is also greater scope for meaningful international comparisons.
But highly sensitive questions remain on some issues, in particular the approach to nursing homes in the first months of the pandemic and the “meaningful Christmas” policy of December 2020. Broader questions remain about whether measures such as school closures went on too long, and the consequences for mental health.
It seems unlikely that these more controversial issues will be addressed to the satisfaction of everyone, in particular those who lost loved ones. Unfortunately, that seems an inevitable consequence of the failure to put in place a more efficient, equitable and constitutionally robust system of public inquiries. In the meantime, a test of the Government’s seriousness about this evaluation will be the resources it allocates to it.