We need a clear message from Government on how to live alongside Covid-19

The coronavirus pandemic has given rise to a range of intriguing political and cultural experiments across the world. Hypotheses about crowd psychology, individual behaviour and the nature of communication have been tested, proved and disproved. Here, as elsewhere, the State has intervened in society on a scale never seen before in peacetime, regulating behaviour, paying wages and temporarily taking over parts of the economy.

Here, Government messaging has displaced traditional advertising to an unprecedented degree. Some aspects of this have been quite successful. The bright-yellow information signs and posters by Zinc Design may not be things of beauty, but they’re highly effective in reminding people about risks and realities as they go about their daily lives. The wall-to-wall radio campaigns, by comparison, seem to fade quickly into invisibility due to blandness and endless repetition.

Once the initial spike in infections abated, the move in early summer to a calendar-based four-phase reopening of the country offered a sense of direction and purpose (and probably also raised unrealistic expectations of a full return to normality). We haven’t had a fiasco like the one that occurred in the UK, when Boris Johnson’s “Stay Alert” message, based on the expectation that a British-developed tracker app would be up and running, had to be retooled at the last minute when that app failed to materialise.

Pitfalls

That example illustrates the pitfalls that can arise when spin and PR get out ahead of reality. But there can be even worse problems if a government appears paralysed or slow in reacting to events. This isn’t just about politics, economics or even science. It’s about a state’s ability to make sense out of apparent chaos, to tell a story to its citizens that gives them hope, and to distil complex information into visual signifiers that everyone can understand. It requires a set of skills – credible storytelling, memorable images, an authentic voice – usually more associated with cultural production than with public administration. And it needs to be rooted in reality.

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Graphic communication is not something this country has traditionally been very good at

This week we learned the Government intends to discontinue the four-phase calendar and that the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) is working instead on plans for a "new long-term framework" for how Ireland lives with Covid-19. Under that framework, a red alert means a full national lockdown, orange implies higher levels of infection and potential regional lockdowns, while yellow means the risk is lower. A blue alert will show the disease has been fully suppressed.

Hovering grimly

At first sight the scheme, which is roughly analogous to the European weather warning system used in Ireland for the past several years, seems crude. A return to full national lockdown is highly unlikely except in the most extreme circumstances, while full suppression is a long way off. So we'll be hovering grimly between yellow and orange over the course of the coming winter. Meanwhile, green (the equivalent to an all-clear in the weather alert system) has been banished from the colour palette, apparently because it might cause confusion due to the entirely separate "green list" of foreign countries to which it is safer to travel (or not, depending which Government advice you read on which day). Former health minister Simon Harris didn't help matters when he referred to the new framework as a "traffic light" system. With a blue light?

Graphic communication is not something this country has traditionally been very good at. The signage in our towns and cities is confused, contradictory and often incomprehensible. Unfortunate foreign tourists grappling with the runic mysteries of Irish public transport timetables used to be a common sight of the Irish summer. Successes such as the Wild Atlantic Way are outnumbered by a thousand failed rebrands or relaunches.

News media bushfires

The phased timetable has clearly outlived its usefulness, but the new approach has its own potential hazards. It proposes moving from a linear narrative in which ongoing improvement is at least an aspiration to one in which the virus is, like the weather, a constant with which we must continue to contend as best we can. Harris also said “an honest conversation” needed to be had about what the future in Ireland looks like as we try to live alongside Covid-19. That may be a reference to the news media brushfires that keep cropping up around issues such as foreign travel.

But there is a real danger that the Government itself, beset in autumn by a never-ending string of challenges and crises, fails to convey a clear vision of where it wants the country to be in six or 12 months’ time. That’s why a clear, credible message, colour-coded or otherwise, should be an absolute priority.