Pandemonium Jack Horgan-Jones and Hugh O’Connell Gill Books, €16.99
Covid is no longer a thing, not for me at least. I seem to have erased all memory of what it was like to live under the various lockdowns. I know I hated it, but I can’t quite remember it.
Pandemonium, a new account of how Ireland dealt with the crisis by two political journalists, reveals those making the decisions also hated it, but also grew to hate each other as different pressures – economic, social, political, and health – competed in the almost impossible task of getting the policy response right.
The informants for Pandemonium might also have faulty memories, because throughout the book it shows different ministers, civil servants and public health officials recalling events slightly differently.
“That’s not how I remember it” must have been quoted a lot to the authors when they put others’ positions to interviewees. We are all capable of misremembering things so that we are the heroes and others are villains, but those in public roles will have an extra motivation to remember things differently.
As well as self-serving interviews, there are also remarkable details of text messages between ministers and public servants, their email exchanges and some memos the public don’t normally get to see.
As we emerge on the other side it is too early to come up with a judgment on how Ireland performed. China was once heralded as an exemplar and President Xi Jinping as sage-like, but now he’s overseeing a dystopian imprisonment of citizens with severe impacts on the Chinese economy.
This book doesn’t try to form judgments, and that is to its credit. Instead it offers a fast-paced account of what was the most all-encompassing crisis the state has ever seen. It reads at a fast pace, and was written at a fast pace too. You feel it could have done with a stronger editorial hand.
Making decisions on Covid in real time with limited data was likened to driving backward in the dark, and the book gives a sense of how little was known by the decision makers.
Pandemonium by Jack Horgan-Jones and Hugh O'Connell
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What emerges is a battle for power, with an unlikely person holding the reins. The former chief medical officer (CMO) Dr Tony Holohan became a major figure who the public trusted.
His supporters saw something “Churchillian” about him. A more appropriate analogue might be Éamon de Valera. Holohan seemed to operate like Dev, wearing down and isolating opponents, centralising control through a new body, Nphet, that never really had any legal basis and just appeared out of the ether.
Holohan emerges as someone who knew what he wanted and used and shaped Nphet to exercise control of the advice going to government. Both health ministers, Simon Harris and Stephen Donnelly, wanted to attend Nphet meetings but Holohan blocked this. The debate in Nphet was reported to be controlled by Holohan to ensure a certain outcome. Instead ministers were to receive “the advice”.
The former CMO was very attached to a decision-making model where public health advice and the political and policy consideration of that advice is kept separate. There is a logic to keeping the advice and the consideration of the advice separate, but it puts a huge amount of power into the hands of the person who delivers that advice.
It didn’t always allow that advice to be interrogated properly, and led to bizarre situations where Nphet met while ministers waited outside for hours drinking tea. Ministers were told to “close your eyes and authorise”.
Nphet advice always seemed to find itself in the media before government had a chance to consider it. Usually that was through leaks, but sometimes Nphet members went to the media, leading one official to complain: “You can’t have it both f**king ways, you can’t be a trusted adviser when, before you give advice, you’re going on Morning Ireland.”
The fights at the centre of government, even as government moved from the caretaker to the new three-party Coalition, were often between Nphet and politicians – and Nphet seemed to always win. The battles may have had the effect of uniting the parties in government somewhat, as they saw a common adversary in Nphet, a body they tried to control but never managed.
This is a remarkable story of power at the heart of government – and we can see the normal lines of decision-making were often blurred. It is revealed that “Holohan came to the conclusion… that his advice was not safe in the hands of the health minister”.
But Holohan also shows how his determination and refusal to compromise can get a system moving in step. He ignored advice when what he wanted was initially rejected as impossible, and in so doing, things seemed to happen for him.
As well as his control of the advice, Holohan’s power was also based on his popularity with the public. He was the most trusted public figure in Ireland for long periods of the pandemic. Neither Leo Varadkar nor Micheál Martin could afford to ignore his advice.
The battles continued, usually played out in the media, with Nphet holding sway even when it held increasingly stubborn positions on issues such as antigen tests. By the end of October last year it was clear the public had moved on.
Despite Nphet’s warnings to restrict socialisation people were doing what they wanted, and those inside Nphet admitted they had “lost the room”. After that politicians took back control.
Eoin O’Malley teaches politics and policy at Dublin City University.
