Analysis: Move on indoor dining for vaccinated ‘fell out of clear blue sky’

“This thing just fell out of the clear blue sky,” said one Government figure of the move to give only vaccinated people the privilege of enjoying indoor activities this summer.

There was palpable anger on Tuesday morning at the Cabinet meeting about the recommendation which landed on Monday night in a letter from the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet).

It was only two days ago when the Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan ruled out such a move when he told RTÉ: “We have had huge support for the vaccination programme and we want that to continue. If you start making it a condition for everyday life, I think we could lose some of the public support, so I don’t think that makes sense.”

If that statement was true then, it is surely true now. Up until this point the message was that we are all in this together, but the fear across all levels of politics is that the proposed system has the potential to create a two-tier society of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.

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The recommendation has once again exposed the fault lines between Government and Nphet, probably in the most obvious way since last October when the chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan dropped the grenade that the country would need to move to Level 5 restrictions.

The big complaint was that Nphet had pressed the nuclear button without giving the Government warning. “Done without any consideration of the wider social and political impact,” said a source at the time.

So how much notice was the Government given this time?

As it turns out it was not a total bolt from the blue. The indoor vaccination plan was floated as an option to a very small number of senior figures in conversations over the weekend. For the vast majority of the Cabinet, however, this was not the case.

Frustration

While the ghost of last Christmas still looms large, Tánaiste Leo Varadkar gave a hint on Tuesday afternoon of the frustration at having to change Government policy on the hop, deal with an irate hospitality sector and figure out a way to actually make such a thing practical.

“We only ever planned to use vaccination passes for international travel and a huge amount of work has been done to get that ready. It was Government policy not to use this for domestic services, this is a big change, it is a difficult change. It is not one that I think anyone up here is delighted or enthusiastic about.”

The fear in Government is that the alternative to vaccination passes is even more unpalatable: keeping the hospitality sector closed indoors until potentially September.

Elaborating on the plans on Tuesday afternoon, Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said the medical view was that younger people working indoors in hospitality, if and when it opens, will not need to themselves be vaccinated.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin said he could see the “apparent contradiction” in that, although many younger people will likely see it not as a contradiction but as a double standard.

The message effectively from Government is that younger people must continue to wait for their chance to get a vaccine, must not socialise indoors, but must still work unvaccinated in those same spaces.

Mr Martin said it has never been a condition for anyone to be vaccinated for their job, and that the same applies to hospitality. The issue, however, is not forcing people to get vaccinated for work, but allowing them the opportunity to protect themselves and this is likely to become a major sticking point over the coming days.

Unworkable

The Government plans to sit down with the hospitality industry on Wednesday to try to work through this new system, but it has already been given short shrift by restaurants and pubs who have described it as unworkable, potential illegal and anti-democratic.

If agreement cannot be reached Ministers will be faced with a Hobson’s choice situation: go ahead with the vaccine plan in the face of severe opposition, reopen for everyone on the same basis and take the Delta risk, or deal a hammer blow to the industry by keeping it closed in this regard for an unspecified time.

Beyond the divide between politics and public health, the events of the last few days have also revealed the inconsistency in messaging from the Government.

Last week the Taoiseach warned there was a “sense of inevitability about the progress of the Delta variant” that would have “implications for the type of restrictions that one would impose”. Days later Mr Varadkar said that a delay to resumption of indoor activities was “not inevitable”.

The public has been confused by the conflicting messages, and the industry has been left irate and exasperated.

And if all of that was not enough to be absorbing, it is understood Ministers have raised questions about Nphet’s doomy modelling predicting up to 700,000 cases by the end of September and more than 2,000 deaths in the worst scenarios.

Sources told The Irish Times that Ministers want this modelling further evaluated by independent experts, and they want a closer examination of how the situation is playing out in the UK.

Put on the spot

There is an acknowledgement and understanding at a senior level that Nphet were somewhat put on the spot and asked to bring their advices forward in order to give certainty to the hospitality sector. “It was rushed,” said one figure, who added that notwithstanding that fact, they do not believe the outcome would have been different even if more time was given.

Such questioning is healthy in a democracy, the Taoiseach said on Tuesday. The reality, however, is that the Government is beginning to ask itself whether such monumental decisions can properly be made on the back of predictions that even the Nphet admits are uncertain.