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LAST UPDATE | 7 Oct 2020
THE HEALTH MINISTER Stephen Donnelly and the Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan discussed the “deteriorating epidemiological situation” before NPHET gave its Level 5 recommendation on Sunday evening.
A spokesperson for the Health Minister said he informed the Taoiseach on Saturday afternoon that a NPHET meeting would be held on Sunday “arising out of concerns about escalating case numbers”.
Donnelly and Dr Holohan “spoke before and after” the NPHET meeting on Sunday, the spokesperson said.
Before the meeting, they discussed the “deteriorating epidemiological situation”.
Minister Donnelly and Taoiseach Micheál Martin communicated after both of these conversations between Holohan and Donnelly on Sunday.
Earlier today, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar and Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan both said that they spoke on the phone last night, following the Tánaiste’s criticism of NPHET the previous night.
Varadkar reiterated that he was “unhappy” about NPHET’s recommendation on Sunday night to enter the country into Level 5, but said the CMO and government are “on the same team”.
Varadkar first expressed his views on RTÉ’s Claire Byrne Live on Monday night, saying the recommendation “came out of the blue” stating that nobody knew Level 5 was being contemplated until Sunday.
Just three days earlier, Thursday’s letter from NPHET had not recommended a move from Level 2 for the rest of the country.
“Government and NPHET have to get back on the same page,” he said, adding that people “won’t see a repeat of this” late-night recommendation.
On Monday, Donnelly explained at a press conference that one of the reasons the government said no to NPHET on this occasion was they did not believe the data had “sufficiently changed in those three days” to justify a Level 5 lockdown.
The minister said the government would have liked to see longer term data trends presented to them “given the severity of the recommendation” and the “seriousness of what was being recommended” by NPHET.
He said the government would have wanted to see a bigger difference in the underlying data.
Speaking to press today, the Tánaiste said neither he nor the CMO were “in the business of apologising”.
“We’re very much on the same team,” he said.
He added: “I was really, really unhappy about what happened on Sunday night, and the anxiety and the fear that it caused for hundreds of thousands of people.”
Speaking at this evening’s briefing at the Department of Health, Holohan said that he heard Varadkar’s interview and that the pair cleared the air last night.
He and I had a conversation about it last night and we exchanged views, we had a long conversation about that and then we moved on to have a conversation about the disease. We recognise, he and I have a long standing good relationship over many years, we recognise we need to continue that together over the course of the next weeks and months.
“I can tell you that he understands and shares my analysis every bit as much and has as much concern about it as I do,” Holohan said.
Speaking later about the government’s decision to move the country to Level 3 and not Level 5, Holohan said he supports that the government has different considerations to NPHET.
“We have a job to do here which is to make an assessment of the disease and to make our advice and recommendations available to government. Government has a different job. It has to consider a range of other considerations and come to a balanced decision based on all of those considerations,” he said.
Not only do I respect that but I support it, the government has to take account of factors which fall well outside of our areas of expertise, but we still have a sober job to do to make the continuing assessment of the disease, which is what we’ve done on this occasion.
“I had an opportunity to talk directly to the Taoiseach this morning and it’s absolutely abundantly clear to me, they need us onboard doing our jobs at our desks the way that we’ve done up to now and the way we’re going to continue to,” Holohan added.
With reporting by Christina Finn and Rónán Duffy
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The biggest trouble with this working paper is that it’s a classic case of nuanced academia meets tabloid headlines.
In this case, tabloid Irish Times coverage
Again… What short term…
My partner works… And makes just to much many to avail of family income supplement school allowances etc…. I need 33k to break even on childcare commute clothing cost when going to work.
We are taxed up to the hilt….
One of us at home… The other making a bit less would give us a higher expendable income and more time with our kids.
Thing is psychological we need work. So now for 100 a month extra we hardly see our kids
This report played right into the Krugman’s fallacy. People who work pay taxes, buy stuff (like child care) and generally support the employment of others. If more people go on the dole that has a strong negative feedback effect on the economy and their neighbors. Which is why, of course, austerity fails in a depression and stimulus works.
Clearly there is nothing wrong with the paper which can be read on the Irish Times, instead what we have is political interference, the powers that be in the ESRI blocking Tol’s research and that suggests the ESRI are not an independent institution. Actually what conclusions can be drawn from this research is how hard it is for low earners to survive in this country, with 7000 to 9000 costs just clocked up yearly form actually going to work. It also makes a laugh of the governments jobsbridge scheme, which is actually costing those with least income in our society to take up these shtty dead-end “internships” because the government has done nothing about job creation.
There is an important point here about the ubiquity of ecomonic commentators in Ireland at the current time. People seem to forget (and some economists don’t seem to realise) that life and society is much more complex than that which can be measured in pure economic terms. This is the same logic that looks at the value of culture only in terms of what it can pull in in hard tourist dollars.
I felt some sympathy (but not too much!) for Moore McDowell on a recent Frontline debate when he was asked to comment on the economics of Arts funding in Ireland. His opinion was undermined before he opened his mouth by PK’s reference to Oscar Wilde’s aphorism about knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing and Michael Colgan was able to seize on this in his criticism of the narrow focus of economics.
The ESRI, as its name suggests, has a remit beyond pure economics but it appears that this working paper leaned too heavily on that particular field of analysis.
Does anyone know the purpose of the ERSI?
And assuming it delivers on that purpose is it more important to our society than many of the services that have been slashed?
Just askin’
Thanks Brendan – I asked for that, so let me put the question a different way….
How would Irish society be worse off if the ERSI didn’t exist?
No problem Paul :)
Well for a start we wouldn’t have any of the following publications: http://www.esri.ie/publications/latest_publications/
ERSI reports are used to develop policy in relation to a wide range of areas. If there was no ERSI, there wouldn’t be the research, so there wouldn’t be any information to work off. So instead of the government of the day making crazed decisions based on the best possible evidence, they’d be making crazed decisions on no evidence at all.
At 12.8 million in 2010 that information comes relatively cheaply, particularly if you consider that in the same year we spent €1.354 Billion on Defence.
Nat,
Just to clear something up – the word ‘unprecedented’ was used by the ESRI themselves in their statement last night, which is why we in The Irish Times used it. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0612/breaking49.html
In the light of this, perhaps you might want to rephrase your introductory comments?
Regards,
Kilian
I’d pay a few pennies to see the opening comment changed to “we checked to see if it was in fact ‘unprecedented’, which the Irish Times didn’t do.”
Kilian,
Fair enough. I’ve changed the original post to reflect this.
http://www.progressive-economy.ie/2012/06/costs-of-working-in-ireland.html
Regards,
Nat
where is my comment
you are now censoring comments
None of your comments have been deleted from this piece Seamus. Was it on one of the other articles about Richard Tol, perhaps?
Well, back for a second small bite, after reading the paper, these and other posts and comments, it is clear that the paper is assigning costs for short term unemployment in a booming economy, while the inference, which the authors have not denied is for long term unemployment, e.g. people who stop working in order to take advantage of the short term differential.
According to Tol himself the “takeaway” food figure is overall spend on convenience food, NOT just lunch money. I suspect the clothing figure of 25 a week is also overall spend and not just for work. Correcting that would make a big difference to the results.
Well Christine another comment has not gone up.???.
There’s no record in the system of you leaving any other comments on this piece (besides the three that have already appeared here) so I’m going to pass this on to our tech team and see what the issue is. None of your comments have been removed by anyone here, just for the record. In the meantime, it could be worth clearing your cache and trying to post again.
Honestly, Christine this has never happened before, two comments in relation to the above article were not posted.
Have you tried turning it off an on again, Seamus?:)
have your say