Taking a position on #Covid19 is fine, so long as you actually have one yourself…

It was good to see Ms McDonald up and fighting fit on The View last night after what must have been a harrowing experience. We should take heart from her recovery and remember that people can and will survive Covid19. Recovery rates in this long struggle will be every bit as important as the number of deaths as we go forward.

To be more critical, I thought it strange there was no explanation forthcoming from Ms McDonald as to how we are going transition from lockdown into a functioning economy. Yes, there was a vague reference to “work that has to be done to get the economy going again” but certainly no meat on the bones of how we might get there.

As Kevin Maguire said in a later segment of The View last night, we need our politicians (of whatever party) to be much more honest about the trade-offs we will have to make between staying safe in the present lockdown and the sort of difficult decisions needed in order to bring it to an end.

This is a debate that has been called for several weeks ago by ML’s rival the Fianna Fail leader and possible next Taoiseach Micheal Martin, but the Sinn Fein leader seems determined to have this issue marked in block capitals as someone else’s problem. The reaction to that was hysterical in some quarters.

But as noted here, there’s a mix of reasons for action:

Perhaps ML is keeping silent so that she has maximum scope for criticising those decisions (whatever they may be) when they come. As an opposition leader, that’s her prerogative. But she forgets that SF has senior responsibility in Northern Ireland so really ought to have outlined her own alternatives rather than just allowing her junior minister to shoot from the sectarian hip.

As I have said here before talk of unified health policy for the island is far too late. But it is not too late to fire up heavy bilateral conversations so that policies can be co-ordinated on an island-wide basis. A successful lifting of restrictions will depend not just on sharing data but on developing a shared north-south understanding of what the other can or indeed needs to do.

This will get more meaningful as testing and tracking become more tractable and useful. We can get outlines from how things are progressing in each jurisdiction but there is no common method for collecting figures which at best provides huge scope for misunderstanding or at worst for potentially dangerous political mischief.

If there is no ramping up of bilateral communication we could very easily default to an incredibly hard border, if only for limited periods of time, and that is something I’m pretty sure that no one wants.

Photo by pasja1000 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

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