Enough avoidable deaths. Mandatory Quarantine is 10 months overdue:.."Rather than quarantining incomers in a hotel for two weeks, our Government opted to quarantine five million Irish citizens in our homes, indefinitely, instead"

 Today's Indo article on Mandatory quarantine:

https://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/mandating-quarantine-and-border-checks-has-got-to-be-top-of-martins-covid-agenda-39993589.html

Highlights:

Micheál Martin claims that he had followed NPHET’s advice all along. Not so. He has persistently diluted their advice. The most important, yet under reported aspect of that advice which hasn’t changed since the outset, is that of mandatory quarantine. Instead, Ireland opted for a “careful now” approach which saw 140,000 people enter the country between 11 December and 3 January, half of whom refused to tell officials where they were staying.

On 14 January, as reports emerged of two new Brazilian variants, the WHO’s Mike Ryan warned that some countries could be ‘in serious trouble’ if new variants change the rules of the game. Having already imported the South-African and UK variants (which are significantly more transmissible), it’s crucial that the coalition heeds this warning. According to Science Magazine, new evolving variants risk undermining the efficacy of the vaccine, which makes mandatory quarantine and the swift roll out of the vaccine absolutely vital.

Transport minister Eamon Ryan’s response has been characteristically lacklustre. Last week, he introduced PCR testing for international travellers (something most countries did months ago), despite NPHET warning that they’re not suitable for use in screening asymptomatic people, such as arriving passengers, and that they should therefore be used in conjunction with mandatory quarantine. On Friday, RTE reported that, since travel restrictions from South-Africa and the UK came into effect on January 9th, some 80 passengers refused to produce a PCR test, yet were still permitted entry.

Human rights are interdependent. Therefore, the right to freedom of movement is not absolute. Article 12(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights allows restrictions on the right to freedom of movement for reasons of public health and national emergency where quarantine is required to limit the spread of a deadly disease.

Rather than quarantining incomers in a hotel for 2 weeks, our government opted to quarantine 5 million Irish citizens in our homes – indefinitely - instead.

When the government finally admitted that mandatory quarantine wasn’t illegal, they still refused to implement it. In July, Simon Coveney said that the government had considered NPHET’s advice on mandatory quarantine but that “we don’t regard it as an approach that makes sense from an Irish perspective”. I defy Mr Coveney to explain how 176,839 Covid-19 cases and 2,708 deaths makes sense from any perspective?

Contrast our losses with countries that enforced strict mandatory quarantine early on. New Zealand: population 5m, 25 deaths. Thailand: population 63m, 71 deaths. Taiwan: population 23m, 7 deaths.

Jacinda Ardern shut New Zealand’s borders in March before any deaths were recorded to prevent the virus taking hold. She said she would not countenance herd immunity because it risked killing thousands of New Zealanders saying, “I’m not willing to tolerate that”. With Ireland drowning in chaos and grief, how many more deaths is Micheál Martin prepared to tolerate before mandating quarantine?

Whether by accident or design, Ireland’s handling of covid-19 unnervingly resembles a herd immunity policy and criminal negligence.

 

Northern Ireland has much been cited as an excuse for not restricting movement on the island or between the UK. Yet, at various times in the pandemic, Wales and Scotland banned visitors from England and Northern Ireland on public health grounds. Plus, if border checks could be deployed to stop the spread of foot and mouth in 2001, why can’t it be done to protect lives in a pandemic?

Asked by the Irish Mirror who would be responsible for increased deaths after the government rejected NPHET’s advice in October, Stephen Donnelly responded, “The virus is responsible”. If you accept power you don’t get to evade responsibility.

If Micheál martin and his ministers are not ashamed of Ireland’s death toll, it’s not because they’re blameless: it’s because they’re shameless.

173 years after Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol "Ignorance" & "Want" Remain the Greatest Threat to Society

 My first article of 2021👇 in today's Irish Independent. It's dedicated to all the homeless people who died on Ireland's streets this year. Suaimhneas síorai dóibh uile💔

This time last year I took my son to watch A Christmas Carol at the Gate Theatre. We see it every year either on stage or in the cinema, followed by volunteering at a soup run. As someone who grew up in a neighbourhood where Dobermann pinschers doubled up as a fashion accessory and personal security, this tradition has been my way of keeping Christmas real for my son who is fortunate enough never to have known hunger.

This year we switched the lights off, curled up with a bowl of popcorn on the sofa and watched the black-and-white version of the Dickens classic on DVD.

The impact of the scene where the charity collectors attempt to extract money from Scrooge never diminishes however many times I watch it. Affronted that the poor would shun workhouses, for which he paid his taxes, Scrooge admonished them – if they would rather die, they’d better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

Charles Dickens’s words never felt so real, echoes of which prevail in political discourse that depicts poverty, homelessness and asylum as life choices. Equally, the Government’s Living with Covid-19 strategy feels uncomfortably reminiscent of the free-market mantra “survival of the fittest”, compounded by the fact that it is our most vulnerable who have been hardest hit by Covid-19.

It’s our elderly, Travellers, disabled, black and ethnic minorities, people in direct provision and those on the lowest wages, or no income – especially women – who are bearing the biggest burden of this pandemic. It’s a fact that the WHO’s Mike Ryan passionately flagged this week when he said Covid had “ripped the bandages from an old wound” exposing “a deeply unfair, inequitable world”.

Choices about allocation of resources, particularly during a time of crisis, are an indicator of Government priorities and serve to either deepen or alleviate social inequalities.

Some children thrown into poverty during the previous recession remain destitute and are struggling to cope with another crisis. One of them is Aisling, who my son and I met at last year’s soup run.

Having been mistreated for years, she left home at 16 and after a few failed foster-home placements ended up on the streets. That was 10 years ago. The last time she slept in a homeless hostel she was attacked and her only pair of shoes was stolen. A warm bed in a safe place is all Aisling wants. We couldn’t give her that so we gave her a hot meal and a hug instead. There were no hugs this year.

Children like Aisling didn’t cause the recession but over a decade later, they’re still paying the price for it whilst its architects, such as former politicians and bank regulators, had their pensions reinstated before Christmas.

This is a time when some parents had to choose between cold and hunger and around 2,642 children woke up homeless on Christmas day.

The taxpayer bailed out banks to the tune of €42bn (Micheál Martin didn’t get that memo) for self-inflicted bankruptcy, but many show no mercy when customers face bankruptcy through no fault of their own. Family homes were, and continue to be, sold to vulture funds with no protections for distressed mortgage-holders. It was a choice to sink taxpayer’s money into the €1.7bn (and counting) children’s hospital and to fight Apple not to hand over €13bn in tax.

Yet in the middle of a health crisis, the choice was made to deny student nurses €14 an hour, not to adequately resource our public health doctors who are now so overwhelmed that they’re planning to strike. Instead of paying the living wage to the essential workers who keep our shelves stacked and our hospitals clean, our Government chose to award judges and themselves a pay increase of 2pc.

In A Christmas Carol, Dickens contrasts the greed and indifference of the rich with the powerlessness and deprivation of the poor. The emergence of the ragged emaciated children from beneath the ghost of Christmas Present’s robe is an arresting scene. Called Ignorance and Want, Dickens’s wrath was directed at the politicians and affluent of the day for wilfully ignoring the abject poverty in their midst.

Despite being the 14th richest country in the world and having the world’s fifth-highest concentration of super-wealthy residents, more than 689,000 people are living in poverty in Ireland, of whom more than 200,000 are children. On Christmas day, the charity Muslim Sisters of Éire served 350 hot meals and handed out “survival kits” in Dublin. They, like many more volunteers throughout the country, are there every week providing a safety net that the State has failed to deliver.

Charity, though vital, is not a sustainable solution to systemic inequalities caused by bad political choices. In 2020, almost 60 homeless people died in Dublin.

Dickens believed ignorance and want were the two social evils that posed the biggest threat to society and 173 years later, the fact that soup runs, survival kits and homelessness exist in Ireland suggests that we’re still haunted by their presence.