Last Friday, microbiologist James McInerney of the University of Nottingham told RTÉ radio he was not “wishing to point out the obvious, but Ireland is an island: it can be sealed”. The alternative, he suggested, was rolling lockdowns not just for this long year but into 2022.
McInerney’s is one of multiple voices pointing out what they see as obvious, but it is an argument swatted away by Government Ministers who point to Nphet’s disinclination to advocate a zero-Covid strategy and the oft-cited “political sensitivities” around closing the Border.
It would be naive to downplay the political complications given the weight of the troubled history attached to the Border, and scientists and medics, understandably, are looking at a different set of criteria. But surely, as the Covid-19 death toll on the island approaches 5,000, it is time for a more mature discussion about how the Border compromises public health and welfare on the island and move beyond the “political sensitivities” justification for inadequate action.
The Border has always been porous; the first Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland in 1938 noted that “No less than 180 roads crossed the Border and in some 35 to 40 instances they defined it, with the frontier lying in the middle and a crossing point every mile”. More recently, in 2018, in the context of Brexit, the first officially agreed account since partition, between the Republic’s Department of Transport and the Northern Ireland Department for Infrastructure, revealed 208 Border crossings, and government technicians endured what was described as a “nightmare” trying to map definitively all the roads, paths and dirt tracks that traverse the 500km of frontier, and there was still confusion about where the Border juts in and out of routes, “or where roads are privately owned on one side and publicly maintained on the other”.
Crossing the line
Historically, it has not proven possible to completely seal the Border even during the most fraught of times – smugglers, paramilitaries, day trippers and even, as revealed during the week, those moving infants from mother and baby homes from 1930 to 1990 found numerous ways and means.
As a result of the peace process, cross-Border journeys are an intrinsic part of daily life for many. To therefore suggest there is a simple solution to the Border issue is a fallacy, but to assert that there is nothing that can be done suggests an awesome admission of both political and public health failure. Members of the Independent Scientific Advocacy Group advocating a zero-Covid strategy have not suggested complete sealing of the Border, but what they term instead “boundary management” and that “checkpoints could be overseen by the Major Emergency Management Regions teams. Checkpoints would involve HSE teams, supported by Garda personnel and so on. They can restrict travel and potentially administer rapid Sars-Cov-2 tests. Border counties would be treated just like any other county, regulating traffic between the Republic and Northern Ireland. Ireland has already implemented temporary public health barriers, but it would need to be done more systematically. There are many feasible strategies for this. For example, ‘travel bubbles’ could be established at the boundaries between two counties (including those either side of the Border) to allow daily commuters to go about their normal business … A system of permits held by cross-zone commuters, essential workers and the like could be established”.
Too vague
There is surely the germ of an approach here, but it is too breezy and vague and ignores that it would require co-operation, compunction and policing on both sides of the Border, but not to explore options and to continually dismiss the idea of a Border clampdown as too politically toxic are greater failures given the assertions on both sides of the Border about the primacy of safeguarding public health. Health and political authorities north and south continually refer to the need for “collective effort” to minimise infection. It needs to work both ways, including the management of cross-Border contact tracing.
In relation to foreign travel, as far back as last July, Northern Ireland’s health minister, Robin Swann, was pointing out his counterpart in the South, Stephen Donnelly, that the “logical solution” would be to ensure that all international travellers landing on the island provided data to both jurisdictions for Covid-19 compliance purposes. Movement on this issue has been far too tardy. In October epidemiologist Gabriel Scally made the telling point, backed by historical experience, that “if this was an animal disease … you could bet your life there would be an integrated approach”.
Over the years, disputes about the Border have engendered various versions of a “dialogue of the deaf”. Given the scale of what is at stake, people across the island deserve a lot more than updated manifestations of that. Is it to be another tragedy of the island of Ireland in 2021 that health, medicine and science could not be divorced from politics on both sides of the Border?