Hogan affair exposes the stupid rules strangling the travel sector

The level of control now being exerted by the Government over everyday social and business life is astounding, regardless of whether or not you believe it to be justified by the threat of the pandemic.

We should never become complacent about the creeping extent of it just because we are afraid of coronavirus.

This control is maintained through a spaghetti bowl of Government regulations and “guidance” that, when doused with the fuel of social shaming, appear to mutate from mere advice into cast-iron law.

Through regulations and de facto-obligatory “guidelines”, Government and wider society now decides where we can travel; where we eat and drink; whether we even drink at all; how many people visit our homes; how long we should spend in company; who we meet; where we work; how we watch sport; how many people with whom we go for a meal; how far apart we stand; what we wear on our faces; how many people can come to see us get married; how many can come to see us get buried; how we comfort each other; when it is appropriate to sing; and the form of transport we use.

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About 1.2 million people are also using a State-backed voluntary contact-tracing app, which works using location data, and for which there was huge social pressure to download. *

The coup de grace lay in Hogan's insistence that he didn't need to quarantine, or restrict his movements, after flying from Brussels because he tested negative for the virus

Most reasonable citizens accept that the danger posed by the virus and our responsibility to keep each other safe justifies a lot of the rules, much of the time. But that doesn’t change the fact that everyday life in a free society was never meant to be regulated to this degree of granularity. It is not normal and it explains why so many people are so stressed and the public mood is so volatile.

Many of the rules and regulations cannot be effectively policed at all, due to their complexity. Instead, the Government must rely on businesses and the public to buy in to the rules. This requires that they should make sense, because people will rarely buy in to what they perceive to be stupid rules.

The regime around the travel industry is littered with a surfeit of stupid rules. The Phil Hogan affair shows it.

The former European trade commissioner lost his post because of his arrogance, which initially blinded him to the fact that the old rules of engagement no longer apply. He was barbecued on the coals of public anger. The coup de grace lay in his insistence that he didn’t need to quarantine, or restrict his movements, after flying from Brussels because he subsequently tested negative for the virus.

The rules and recommendations governing the travel industry actually say he should have continued to quarantine up to 14 days, regardless of his negative virus test after six days here. But that is the archetype of a stupid travel rule. It makes no sense, because if Hogan had not travelled here and lived here ordinarily, and had, for example, been in close contact with someone infected, he would have been free to go after his test.

If someone travels into the country, quarantines for almost a week, and has no symptoms and tests negative, for God's sake, let them go

What is the fundamental difference between someone with a negative test following travel, and someone living here who tests negative? There is surely an equal chance between them of a false negative – the virus doesn’t know whether you stepped off a plane or were here all along. Why is one deemed a greater risk than the other? Because a stupid rule says so. That is the only reason.

Scientists will point out that the virus has an incubation period of up to 14 days and that, to be sure, to be sure, it is safer to quarantine for the full two weeks even if you test negative after almost one week. But blithely restricting someone’s free movement in pursuit of that level of scientific surety is an affront to common sense and civil liberties. It is also economically ruinous.

The World Health Organisation says "on average" it takes five to six days after infection for symptoms to show. Yes, it could possibly take up to two weeks, but only in a minority of cases, especially if the person, like Hogan, had no symptoms. If we are correctly balancing theoretical risk with the need to get on with life, we should follow the law of averages and not the law of scientific perfection.

If someone travels into the country, quarantines for almost a week, and has no symptoms and tests negative, for God’s sake, let them go. Let stringent social distancing and a properly-resourced testing and contact tracing system deal with the few that slip through the net.

The virus is going to be with us for a long time. Ireland, as a nation, cannot self-isolate from the rest of the world for all of that time

Our descent into a petty rules-based bureaucracy is obscuring the whole reason why the rules exist in the first place. We devise them to keep us safer from the virus, and not just for the sake of following them. Even though Hogan broke the guidelines and probably deserved to go, when he said he was a threat to nobody after testing negative, he was broadly correct. At least, he was if we are going to judge what he said with any real degree of common sense.

In the long term, it is far healthier for our society that people and businesses push back against oppressive and intrusive restrictions and constantly demand their justification. And we should never shut up complaining about the stupid ones. Some of Ireland’s travel/quarantine quasi-rules reek of stupidity.

Foreign travel has contributed to the recent rise in case numbers across Europe, but no government has yet fingered it as the main cause of the upsurge. Other countries with higher rates of infection than ours have less onerous travel rules. They are trying to protect their travel industries, and so should we.

The virus is going to be with us for a long time. Ireland, as a nation, cannot self-isolate from the rest of the world for all of that time. Some of our airlines could get into difficulty and that matters when you are an island.

Foreign investors also won’t pump more cash into a country that they effectively cannot visit. Our emigrants also cannot visit their families, not without locking themselves away first. Society and the economy needs to breathe.

The Government must come up with a more sustainable, long-term set of rules for foreign travel than the fear-driven regime we are enduring now. It may mean we have to accept a few things that are scientifically sub-optimal.

But socially and economically, it would be worth the risk and manageable.

*This article was amended on August 28th, 2020.