Fadó fadó in Éireann, let’s say two decades ago, there is a pandemic. Call it Covid-99 – our current plague but in a previous time.
An effective vaccine has somehow been invented. It is becoming available for mass use, but supplies are still scarce and rationed.
You’ve seen the good news stories on the TV, smiling people with their sleeves rolled up, radiant with relief. But you are very worried about your granny in the nursing home or your child who has an underlying condition – why are their appointments taking so long?
What do you do in this Ireland of 20 years ago? After you’ve tried the obvious things like talking to your GP, you get on to your constituency TD. The TD says: leave it to me, I’ll sort you out.
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What then kicks in is a time-tested system of “imaginary patronage”. The TD’s office fires off a blizzard of letters – to the minister, the public health authorities and whoever is running the vaccination programme.
In reality, these “representations” achieve very little except to waste the time of people with much better things to be doing. But they do yield a vital nugget of information: your granny is going to get her vaccination at noon on January 11th.
You get a call from the TD: I fixed that for you – noon on January 11th. You feel grateful. You will remember this when the next election comes.
In the Covid-99 crisis, the Lads are all over this like fat bluebottles off a freshly laid cowpat
Your granny got her jab when she was going to get it anyway. But that’s not what you think happened. This exercise in imaginary patronage corrupts everything. It becomes “known” that this behind-the-scenes influence is the way you get your jab.
Poisoned trust
That four-letter word is now embedded in the lexicon of the Covid-19 pandemic in Ireland: pull. Trust in the fairness of the system is poisoned.
This is now the base level of corruption. Further up the scale, where the patronage is not at all imaginary, something else is going on.
In the early months of the pandemic, there is a terrible panic about the shortage of personal protective equipment for hospitals and nursing homes. Everybody, with good reason, is screaming for PPE.
Public money is no object – just get the stuff here right now. Never mind rules or procurement procedures. Cut corners.
In the Covid-99 crisis, the Lads are all over this like fat bluebottles off a freshly laid cowpat. It’s feeding time at the crony compound. All good men must come to the aid of the party, sorry, nation and what harm if a few tens of millions get spilled from the bucket into offshore bank accounts?
Let’s return now from this nostalgic reverie of our romantic past and ask: did any of this stuff happen in Ireland in the real pandemic of Covid-19? Whisper it, but the answer is almost certainly that, to any meaningful extent, it did not.
Amidst all the grief and grimness, this plague may just have told us something good: Ireland seems to be a less corrupt country than it used to be.
Using the Johnson administration as a comparator sets the bar so low, the lithest limbo dancer could not pass under it
There were, in the early days of the vaccination programme, bad incidents of queue-skipping at the two hospitals in Dublin. But even they did not involve any kind of financial or political corruption.
The overwhelming impression of the vaccination drive is that it has been honest. No one, so far as I know, ever thought that a TD or anyone else could fix it for you or your granny. Patronage, imaginary or otherwise, has not been at work. We got our appointments because we were due to get them.
PPE gold
As for the PPE panic, we know that the pot of gold was vast. The Health Service Executive spent about €1 billion on PPE and about €380 million was wasted. It was thrown at suppliers who sent us rubbish.
In addition, the HSE paid previously unknown suppliers €81 million in advance for 2,200 ventilators. Only 465 were delivered. None were actually used.
With the guts of half a billion euro up for grabs for the purchase of stuff that had no real value, this was surely the greatest single opportunity for corruption in the history of the State.
And yet, there is no evidence that anybody in Ireland actually seized this chance for self-enrichment. The mistakes, it seems, were honest ones, made by frantic people doing their best in horrible circumstances.
We should not have to feel grateful for any of this. But look across the Irish Sea, where there was a flagrant “priority lane” for PPE contracts to be awarded to political cronies and Tory donors, even if they had no previous history of supplying it.
Admittedly, using the Johnson administration as a comparator sets the bar so low, the lithest limbo dancer could not pass under it. Yet by the standards we ourselves used to operate, the contrast is telling: Ireland is now demonstrably less politically corrupt than England is.
This is not for a moment to suggest that vigilance can be relaxed or that there is any reason for smugness. But maybe there has really been a shift in Irish political culture. Maybe, in the great test of the pandemic, it has come up negative for what used to be its most endemic disease.