Ireland and England Have Taken Two Different Routes on COVID-19 But iT was Ireland Who Went Smart
March, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his fiancée, Carrie Symonds, could be found standing among an 81,000-strong crowd at a stadium in Twickenham, just west of London. There, they watched England play Wales at rugby, shook many an unwashed hand and joined heartily in celebrations as England narrowly bested its rival.
But here in Dublin, Ireland’s normally bustling capital, the rugby field was empty that day. That was because the government had cancelled Ireland’s scheduled match with Italy as one of its first precautions against the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Days later, the government closed schools, universities and child care facilities, and banned mass gatherings. All non-essential businesses throughout Ireland, including pubs, were then ordered to close. The lockdown is only scheduled to be lifted gradually later this month. Yet in Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, schools, pubs, restaurants, cafes and other businesses remained open until Johnson ordered them shuttered in stages starting on March 20.
“North and south, there have been two different approaches to coronavirus, and with two different results,” says Samuel McConkey, a professor specializing in infectious diseases at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
The U.K. currently has the fourth-highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the world, according to Johns Hopkins University, with just over 200,000, and it could soon surpass Italy and Spain to take the No. 2 spot behind the United States. The U.K. also now has the highest number of COVID-19-related deaths in Europe, with more than 30,000, also second only to the U.S. globally. Meanwhile, Ireland has just under 1,400 deaths out of just over 22,000 cases—a notable difference even with Ireland’s smaller population. Data from the European Union indicates that Ireland saw much the same number of total deaths this week than it normally does at this time of year.
This discrepancy has also had a significant political impact, both north and south of Ireland’s contentious land border. The left-wing nationalist Sinn Fein party, which is riding high after its unexpected success in Ireland’s most recent general election in February, has seized on the pandemic to reiterate calls for a single health policy on the island. Sinn Fein’s leader, Mary Lou McDonald, recently called COVID-19 a powerful “accelerant” in her party’s calls for Irish unity.
Pro-British unionist politicians in Northern Ireland have accused Sinn Fein of turning a public health crisis into a political football, while condemning any moves to take a lead from Dublin, rather than London, in tackling the virus. Nonetheless, “there’s a growing feeling here that London called this badly wrong,” says Colin Harvey, a professor at Queen’s University Belfast. “It just adds to a growing debate here about how we share this island.”
The first confirmed coronavirus case on the island demonstrated how interlinked its northern and southern parts already are. A woman who had flown to Dublin from Italy, then caught the train across the open border to Belfast, tested positive in late February. Ireland and the U.K. have a Common Travel Area agreement that guarantees free passage of goods and people. Until the end of last year, both countries were also members of the EU, which meant an open border. Now, Ireland remains part of the bloc while the U.K. is scheduled to leave the EU at the end of 2020, following a one-year transition period.
“With the virus arriving at the same time, both north and south, you would expect the death rates that then followed in the two parts to be roughly the same,” says Michael Tomlinson, a professor at Queen’s University’s School of Social Sciences in Belfast. “But what I found when I started looking was that instead, there are substantial differences.”
As awareness grows of the starkly contrasting approaches adopted by the U.K. and Ireland, many scientists have called for an all-Ireland approach to tackling COVID-19.
Tomlinson compared the two jurisdictions’ total COVID-19 death rates, and the rates for those who had died in hospitals, for a period up to April 20. He found that under both measures, the rates in the Republic of Ireland were only around two-thirds of those in Northern Ireland.
Tomlinson and other experts ascribe that to the Irish and British governments’ different approaches to tackling the virus early on, like Ireland’s decision to implement a lockdown sooner in March. Another key difference was that the U.K. abandoned its strategy of mass testing and contact tracing on March 12, shifting briefly to a controversial “herd immunity” strategy, by which enough people within the population gain immunity to the virus from having had it and recovered, so that the virus is unable to spread further. Irish authorities, however, stayed the course on testing the population—a decision that led to major backlogs in testing results, but likely helped Irish public health experts maintain a level of control over the virus’s spread that their British counterparts lost.
Comparisons of the numbers between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are not easy, however, as they use different methods of accounting. Until April 28, Northern Ireland was abiding by the U.K.’s policy to only report deaths from the coronavirus that occur at hospitals, which likely caused a significant undercount. The Republic of Ireland, meanwhile, has reported all COVID-19 deaths in its daily tally.
Further complicating this is the fact that Northern Ireland has two agencies announcing figures: the Department of Health and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. The two agencies produce different data, so the confusion in reporting—along with some actual errors and gaps in records—led the U.K. Statistics Authority in London to condemn the Northern Ireland Department of Health’s methods at the end of April, citing “serious public concern” over the reporting of data.
Behind these different approaches also lie significant political differences. “In the U.K., everything has to be controlled” by the prime minister’s office, says Tomlinson. “You see this centralization, too, in the development of the apps,” he adds, referring to smartphone apps being developed in London and Belfast to help track and trace the coronavirus. The U.K.’s app “will hoover up information for cloud and data analysts in Westminster,” Tomlinson says, “while the one in the Republic [of Ireland] will follow EU rules on data protection and allow a much more decentralized, community-based approach.”
Now, as awareness grows of the starkly contrasting approaches adopted by the two countries, many scientists on both sides of the border have called for an all-Ireland approach to tackling the virus. They argue that the island forms a single epidemiological unit, given its open border and generally similar culture and geographic conditions. Proponents of Irish unification have also been bolstered by Brexit, which a majority of residents in Northern Ireland voted against.
“Many people see Brexit as very economically damaging, to both the north and south,” says Brian Feeney, a widely respected columnist at The Irish News, a Belfast-based newspaper. “There is already one other strong argument there for all of us being one unit: the EU.”
Meanwhile, in the south, Sinn Fein’s historic success in the February elections also galvanized the debate there on Irish reunification. No party emerged from the ballot with a parliamentary majority, and the two parties most likely to form a coalition government, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, are both traditionally conservative and have long been fierce rivals. But last month, they reached an initial agreement to form a coalition, pending further support from smaller parties. The contents of the deal partially acknowledged the electorate’s nationalist shift by calling for the establishment of a designated unit at the prime minister’s office in Dublin that would “work towards a consensus on a united Ireland.”
Yet it is uncertain how the debate over reunification will play out on the northern side of the border. “In a divided place like Northern Ireland, there is a major challenge of leadership,” says McConkey. “There is a legacy of a dysfunctional executive, and a lack of human trust and ability to work together.”
“Without those things,” he adds, “people resort to the banging of drums: the unionists follow London and the nationalists Dublin. It’s really not very helpful, though, when you are trying to respond to a huge, global pandemic.”
Jonathan Gorvett is a journalist, writer and analyst specializing in European and Near Eastern affairs, currently based in Ireland
Comments