There's little enough point in being a columnist if you can't change your mind. Last week I declared how well we've done in confronting the challenge of foot-and-mouth disease, and this week I say we are behaving like a bunch of witless clots in yet another of the morality competitions that we appear to love so passionately. These competitions used to consist of a rededication to the principles of the men of 1916, the foreign missions, devotion to Rome or feeding Africa. Now it's a contest to see who is doing most to combat foot-and-mouth.
Listen. We haven't got foot-and-mouth. We have had one confirmed case of it, and that was in Armagh (and the response to that in north Louth was to host the largest discotheque Ireland has seen this century). Otherwise, there is no foot-and-mouth in Ireland; yet the country is covered with foot-and-mouth-stopping mats. You can't enter a Dublin city hotel or a restaurant without having to wipe your feet, as if having disinfected soles to your shoes cleanses you from toenail to scalpy follicle, slaying the viral beasts in much the same way that the font of holy water at the entrance to a Catholic Church puts the devil to the sword.
Dire warnings
This is all hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo. Firstly, never mind the experts for a moment, and all their dire warnings: what, after all, are experts for if it is not to promise us Armageddon is round the corner? In my lifetime, they've promised us we were going to run out of oil, of oxygen, of trees, of sunlight, that we all going to die by drowning or botulism or foul air or of AIDS. Fine; now they are assuring us that wherever two of us gather, we are in danger of spreading foot-and-mouth.
Secondly, how many cases are there in which foot and mouth was transmitted by one human carrying the virus about his clothes or person to another person who then carried the virus about her person to animals? How many? Go on, tell me: how many? Every case in Britain has been traced either to beast-to-beast infection, or to wind-borne viral plumes. No-one has yet been able to identify an occasion in which the vector was human intercourse of any kind.
Yet here in Ireland, where we haven't even got foot-and-mouth, all forms of social contact are being cancelled - even basketball matches between inner-city schools where they think a yeo is an informal American salutation and ewe a second person pronoun. But pubs are not closing, Grafton Street is as busy as ever it was, schools remain open, as do churches outside the diocese of Armagh. The only parts of Dublin which have been closed down are those bits which rather copy the countryside, such as St Stephen's Green - and this without the disease even existing here.
Sensible precautions
But is it not sensible to take precautions? It is - as it is, within reason, to take precautions against Tanzania launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Knock Airport, or to ensure we know what to do if we are hit by Mars, and what steps to take if we are invaded by man-eating gerbils from Tibet. The world is, after all, a dangerous place, full of diseases and threats to mankind.
And what about malaria? Sleeping sickness? Elephantiasis? Rabies? Leprosy? I ask you: What precautions has this Government or any government taken against these diseases? What steps has it taken against the arrival of malarial mosquitoes or tsetse flies? None? All right; but if it thought that those diseases or those insects were a threat, would it content itself with combating the mosquitoes by getting incoming passengers to wipe the soles of their shoes at Dublin Airport or the ferry ports?
No, it wouldn't. The truth is is actually quite simple. The Government - and those fine people in the Department of Agriculture who so distinguished themselves during the beef scandal, and then during the BSE horrors, and whose vigilance in the Kepak slaughtering plant in Roscommon was so splendid that 200 illegally imported sheep were butchered there without them noticing - they know two things. The first is that it is not economically or politically feasible to employ the measures which will genuinely raise a genuinely effective viral cordon sanitaire around our national herds. The second is that they cannot announce their incapacity to do this, so they have taken resort to voodoo tokenism, merely in order to be seen to be doing something, just as during the Black Death, people festooned themselves with garlic and wiped toadskin across their breasts.
Doing something
And frankly, I don't blame the Government. It has to be seen to be doing something, and getting us to wipe our feet as we go into restaurants, and stopping every car as it crosses the Border and asking searching questions of their occupants are doing something. But such methods are not going to halt the spread of f & m. They are simply irrelevant to the aetiology of the disease.
But, of course, they are not irrelevant to the political need to be doing something conspicuous, be it never too irrelevant, nor to our own need to enter a morality competition, not merely among ourselves, but with the British. And that is a contest we invariably win, even though the Brits usually aren't aware it's taking place. It's taking place now, the length and breadth of Ireland. And do you know what? We're winning it again.