Does anyone understand why English tourists are being encouraged to come to Ireland, provided that they are not rugby followers? If they come from Cumbria to traipse all over the countryside with a fishing rod in their hands, or from Devon bearing golf clubs, an eye on half-a-dozen different courses, they're welcome; but if they come from disease-free London, and their intention would have been to go cowless, pig-free, unsheeped Lansdowne Road to watch an international, they are given the same welcome as plague rats.
Why? We have responded to the foot-and-mouth outbreak with the same regard for the aetiology of the disease which our ancestors showed towards previous plagues - with ritual dances, magic potions, spells and pious intonations. Restaurants and hotels in the centre of Dublin reinvoked the spirit of the holy water font at Catholic churches, but now using a holy carpet on which one wiped one's feet, as if that process could infuse one's body with a cleansing, anti-viral grace.
Medieval mumbo-jumbo
No magic formula depended so much on medieval mumbo-jumbo as did the Department of Agriculture faxes which authorised the movement of horses. These were routinely issued in reply to faxed requests, and with no inspection ever taking place. Without the magic piece of fax paper to wave under the nose of an official, you could not enter a horse show.
This was pure gobbledegook, merely a secular recycling of the old Catholic belief in indulgences, administered with an inflexible disregard for logic or common sense - or, indeed, the contents of the horse-box.
So wheels were being sprayed on admission to horse shows, but not the vehicles' insides, which is where the virus, if present, might be expected to reside.
Of course, if you were to spray the interior of every lorry moving through the Irish countryside, all movement would simply come to a halt and the economy would founder. So we resorted to ritual, and then agreed upon a consensus that it was the ritual, rather than the absence of the virus, which was saving us from foot-and-mouth.
Ritual achieved levels of pure farce on the main Border crossing between Newry and Dundalk, where two-mile-long north-south tailbacks accumulated daily as every vehicle was comprehensively sprayed on its outside. Seeing this huge queue recently , I turned right into Jonesboro, to try my luck in the myriad of boreens of South Armagh, and was promptly lost. To be sure, I ran into the odd SAS patrol which had been stranded there since 1982 - gaunt, famished men with twitches, like Japanese soldiers skulking in the Philippine jungles, but otherwise saw not a soul.
Odd, driving through South Armagh. You always feel you're being watched, though you can see nobody. Spine-tingling hours later, I finally entered a small hamlet. I asked a nice woman where I was. I was back in Jonesboro. No doubt the SAS men know the feeling well. How could I cross the Border without rejoining the hell on wheels on the Newry-Dundalk Road, I shrieked politely. Turn right up there and keep going, she said.
Garda checkpoint
I did. There was a Garda checkpoint at the Border, but vehicles going through it were not being sprayed - and this a mile down the road from Meigh, the centre of the disease in Ireland. So on the one hand, we have the anti-viral juju being very visibly performed on the main north-south road, deliberately causing maximum inconvenience to motorists, and largely as a public relations exercise (Look! We're taking foot and mouth very seriously). On the other, a mile or so into the hinterland, and adjacent to the only farm where the disease has existed in Ireland, there were, to all extents and purposes, no controls at all.
This isn't a studied exercise in epidemiology. It's witchdoctor-capering. It's performing conspicuously pious acts so they can be seen to be done. There can be no other vehicles to leave and area where animals were culled because of the actual existence of the foot-and-mouth virus without being sprayed, while not far away, disease-free vehicles on a main road are being held up for hours in order to be put through a laborious decontamination ceremony.
Spiritual Eye
Not that the spraying makes any difference at all, other than - here goes - "heightening awareness", Awareness is rather like the godly grace resulting from participation in a Corpus Christi procession. Though the deed is public, the outcome is largely perceived by the spiritual eye of the participant.
The vectors for foot-and-mouth are somewhat more concrete than that: feeding pigs with infected animal matter, or allowing contaminated herds or their respiratory or cloacal waste come in contact with clean ones. Those are the vectors which have defined the spread of the disease in Britain. Provided we prevent these means of transmission, foot-and-mouth will not occur in Ireland.
Nothing has been achieved by the magic carpets infusing viral piety upwards through the soles of diners in Dublin; nor anything achieved by people not watching rugby in Dublin, even as Bord Failte was campaigning for British anglers to enjoy the mayfly season on Lough Corrib. We waved a wand of sanctimony over carefully selective illogic and called it policy. And because we didn't get foot and mouth, for reasons largely unrelated to these measures, we have been saying the policy was successful. If foot and mouth really were to come to Ireland, however, we'd soon learn the utter valuelessness of such epidemiological rain-dances.