If the air is damp, the foot-and-mouth virus can supposedly travel on the wind for up to 150 miles over sea, or 40 miles over land. So when there are outbreaks in north-west Wales and south Armagh, it takes a bit of luck to keep foot-and-mouth disease out of this State.
Luck, however, doesn't make much of a running story. Instead, for the last three weeks, the media here have focused on "precautions". In newspapers, columns and columns have been turned over to repeating the same travel advisories day after day; on television, farmers have seen hours of video of disease symptoms and disinfectant procedures; on radio phoneins, anyone daring to proceed with a mountain hike or a pop concert has been accused of national treachery.
On the Internet, space has been turned over to lists of cancellations of events we never would have heard of otherwise. "The training of Parish Facilitators for the Listening Process in the Diocese of Ferns beginning 5 March has been postponed," we learn at www.rte.ie/footandmouth.
"The mood of national joylessness", as one senior journalist has called it, has to be appeased. To judge by last weekend's opinion poll in the Sunday Independent, the mood is shared by most of the public: the vast majority of those polled said they supported the Government's restrictions and were prepared to go alone with stronger ones. As columnist Declan Lynch suggested, it was "patriotic" to put up with cancellations of local junior-football matches, no matter how irrational such cancellations might be.
If some people are feeling hard done by, they are not likely to come out and say so in the media. An article by Keith Duggan in the sports pages of last Saturday's Irish Times contained one of the stronger complaints about the situation that have appeared in print, but the opinion is not attributed to any named person. Instead, Duggan writes: "To many of those involved in sport, it seems as if they have been hamstrung by the precautions while the rest of the country carries on with a virtually unchanged daily routine."
And obviously the unnamed sportspeople are right. Sporting events seem to have been chosen as a sacrificial lamb, a safe and not-too-costly symbol of the national effort against foot-and-mouth disease. (You have to wonder how quick the GAA, for example, would have been to cancel events if the panic had occurred, say, in summer, just in time for the provincial hurling and football finals.)
Meanwhile, while a few hundred people are prevented from gathering at a club rugby game or an amateur rowing regatta, many thousands of commuters are carried in their cars, buses and trains, by their "daily routine", near the spots in Kildare and Louth where alerts and "precautionary culls" have taken place, into their urban jobs, then back out into the country again. And these commuters could have shared whatever viruses they might be carrying with countless other people from all over the country.
The tourism industry has not been slow to complain about its loss of revenue. The tourist-coach business alone claims, according to the Sunday Tribune, to have lost £2 million in the first week of the crisis, even before St Patrick's Day and all the lost tourism that entails. Those troubles are likely to continue: once we've finished with Paddy's Day without parades, we'll be offering tourists Ireland without visits to the countryside.
Still, so far, for people not too badly affected, the inconvenience caused by precautions has an element of adventure, of folks pulling together in a crisis, and the media have caught that well.
There are a couple of different roles which a responsible media could be expected to play in response to a potential crisis like this. One of them is to be a forum for critical debate. In Britain, for example, some publications have raised questions about whether slaughtering and burning more than 100,000 animals is the appropriate way to deal with a nonfatal disease that's confined to a few species and scarcely affects humans. In the London Independent on Sunday, the March 4th front page read: "The plague that never was - Why foot and mouth should not be a crisis". A comment article inside was headed: "To be killed for having flu is as sick as it gets".
A cartoon by Martin Rowson in the English magazine Time Out, reproduced on this page, is along similar lines; it shows a satisfied cow and pig who have burned down a human school because a child had a sniffle.
The opinions expressed in these publications are not necessarily correct, of course, but they represent a strand of thought about the disease and how to deal with it which has only got the briefest of look-ins in Ireland.
Why is that? Agriculture remains a hugely important business here (just how important has been the matter of lots of media debate lately). Exports of meat and livestock are particularly important, and certainly foot-and-mouth would affect these exports. (That's in spite of the fact that the disease is increasingly common elsewhere in the world - see panel, below.) So even if foot-and-mouth is basically an economic disease, affecting the profitable progress of farm animals, those economics are vital to this State and many of its people.
In these circumstances, the media here have concentrated on another crucial role in a crisis: disseminating of useful information. RTE has taken on this responsibility with enthusiasm, broadcasting special TV and radio programmes and setting up that impressive website with all its trivial and not-so-trivial information. Two weeks ago there was widespead criticism of the Government's "ring of steel" hype about Border security; throughout the crisis, The Irish Times has been very sharp on the smuggling story (see below). However, most of the time, most of the media have settled into a supportive role in this crisis, keeping the public updated about what it needs to do and backing the State's efforts. It has been, in its small way, a taste of what wartime media might be like.
