Health Minister Simon Harris With some honourable exceptions, we don’t have journalists in Ireland, we have cheerleaders, writes John McGuirk
“Excellent investigative Journalism in the Sunday Times”, tweeted Irish Independent columnist Colette Browne on Sunday morning, in response to the extensive report the London-based paper had just published laying out the multiple alleged failures of Boris Johnson’s government during January and February, leading allegedly to the present dire state of affairs across the Irish Sea.
She wasn’t wrong. It was, indeed, a riveting report, suggesting that Mr Johnson’s administration had simply failed to take matters seriously enough, quickly enough, and that the exceptionally bad outbreak in Britain can be traced to a series of missed meetings and decisions taken too late.
Ms Browne’s assessment was widely shared in the Irish media. “Devastating”, was the verdict of the Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole. On RTÉ, Tommy Gorman suggested that the British Government had been distracted by Brexit, and absurdly, that Britain didn’t have figures of the stature of Tony Holohan, Ireland’s Chief Medical Officer.
At the same time as Irish journalists were slobbering over the latest drama from across the water, an interview was being published in Colette Browne’s own newspaper, the Sunday Independent, with our own Health Minister Simon Harris. It began by noting that Mr Harris “is more popular than ever”. The first question posed to the minister was “whether he was uncomfortable being so popular”. He must have struggled with that one.
Ventilators
In fairness to the interviewer, he did ask Mr Harris why action had not been taken earlier. “Look”, said Harris, “four months ago, nobody knew about this virus. We had a general election on February 8 and nobody asked me about ventilators, because you didn’t know about the virus, and neither did I.”
And that was that. No follow up, no hard questions. And so, in the one day, we had the spectacle of the Irish press denouncing a “devastating” report that Boris Johnson’s government hadn’t prepared properly in January, while accepting at face value that the Government here “didn’t know” about the virus in February.
That same day, Ireland reported 39 new deaths. Norway, Australia, and New Zealand reported one each.
Nobody expects any government to be perfect, but the utterly unquestioning attitude of our media to Leo Varadkar and company is beyond credulity. If you don’t remember, let’s recall some of the mistakes: the Government sent a memo to nursing homes telling them that bans on visitors were, well, banned. Then it sent a memo to nursing home staff telling them that they had no need to wear personal protective equipment. Then, if those weren’t enough, it told nursing homes that patients who were sick were not to be sent to hospitals.
All of those things happened in February and March. And at the time of writing, Ireland ranks 10th in the world in terms of deaths per head of population. Not tenth best – tenth worst.
And yet, for all that, the same Irish media that obsesses over the failures of Boris Johnson can only muster, to Simon Harris, questions like “is it hard being so popular?”
We don’t have journalists in Ireland, by and large. With some honourable exceptions, we have cheerleaders.
We have a Health Minister who says he didn’t even know about the virus on February 8 – but it broke out in Wuhan, China, in early December”
You really do get the impression sometimes that independence from Britain might have been a mistake. Not because of the economy or anything else – but because it’s made life for our politicians and our journalists so much harder. You would wonder whether they’d actually have more fun sitting on the opposition benches in the House of Commons, not having to make any decisions at all, but getting to blame Boris and the British for everything.
Our media would certainly have an easier time of it, getting to actually ask hard questions, and hold people to account.
Here’s the thing: this is Ireland. What happens in Britain is interesting, and has some impact on us, but what happens here is actually far more important. The people of whom hard questions should be asked are not in London; they’re in Dublin. For weeks now, Minister Harris has promised that testing would increase. For weeks, it has not increased. For weeks, the nursing homes have been becoming death traps for those unlucky enough to be in them, and for weeks, nobody has challenged the Government about it.
We have a Health Minister who says he didn’t even know about the virus on February 8 – but it broke out in Wuhan, China, in early December. What was he doing? Boris Johnson missing five meetings about the virus in January merits a five-minute report on the Six One News by Tommie Gorman, but the health minister not knowing about the virus in February didn’t get a mention on RTÉ.
It’s not news, much of what we get in Ireland. Journalism is very important at times like this – both to inform the public, and to challenge those who govern us. When Minister Simon Harris and An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar don’t have to worry about hard questions, they don’t have to think, or work, as hard as they should. They should be afraid of every press conference they walk into, but they’re not.
“The Irish media”, said Simon Coveney this week, “is great.” In any other country, if the government was praising the media like that, journalists would be asking what they were doing wrong.
Imagine if Donald Trump started saying American journalists “were doing a great job” – people would stop trusting the American media, and think it was just saying things that made the president happy. Well, that’s exactly what’s happening in Ireland, where we’re expected to believe that other countries don’t have people just as good as Tony Holohan. They do. And they also have better journalists than we do too.