Derek Scally: Some home thoughts from Berlin on Covid-19

A favourite pandemic parlour game has been to look elsewhere and wonder what we could learn from them on Covid-19.

One day we need to be more like Sweden. The next: what can we learn from the Germans? The obvious problem with all of these is that the Irish aren’t Swedish or German. A far more interesting question is: what does Ireland’s Covid-19 response say about its people?

Looking in from Berlin, it was impressive how many in Ireland embraced meitheal 2.0. Instead of coming together to save the harvest, people looked at what needed to be done – from shopping to shared childcare – and helped out. Social structures in Ireland are more intact than many dared hope, with reservoirs of consideration and compassion that are not a given elsewhere in the western world

But meitheal isn’t the only visitor from the past I’ve noticed creeping back into Ireland’s pandemic present. In 2020, shame is once again having a moment.

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As an unofficial listening service for many friends in Ireland, I’m struck by how many of them feel that anxious and bitter people are setting the pandemic agenda.

They tell wounding stories about being upbraided and shamed – by neighbours, friends or strangers on the street – by people who felt entitled – compelled – to intervene, even if they were doing nothing wrong.

The rush to judge was clear in an ESRI survey a month ago that nearly three-quarters of Irish people think anyone who contracts Covid-19 had been “careless or reckless” in following health advice.

That is a staggering and telling figure – all the more worrying if a fear of being blamed and shamed prevents people going for a test.

Toxic gossips

Ireland’s toxic gossips, skewered a century ago in Brinsley MacNamara’s The Valley of the Squinting Windows, have gone digital and are having a busy pandemic. Then as now, virtue-signalling outrage is their default mode.

“It was her place of power,” Sheridan wrote of one character, “to give out an opinion ... on any person at all that would almost take the hearing out of your ears.”

Another Irish friend finds the country's obsession with its medical briefings problematic, given such briefings never happened elsewhere or have long ceased

Walking around Dublin city centre last month, for the first time in seven months, things looked less grim than I expected – once you didn’t look too closely. What I didn’t expect, though, was a new hum of low-level tension.

When I met Tánaiste Leo Varadkar two weeks ago in Berlin, he was struck by the absence of that tension in the German capital. And here’s the thing: after a glorious summer, and no shortage of what NPHET (National Public Health Emergency Team) would denounce as “reckless” behaviour, Berlin’s infection rate – though rising –is still about one-third that of Dublin’s.

For months, one Dublin friend has called me regularly to vent his fury at Irish politicians and experts over their casual use of emotive language which, he fears, can profoundly damage those already ill-equipped to cope with uncertainty.

“Everyone’s giving lip service to mental health these days,” he says, “so stop scaring people.”

Another Irish friend finds the country’s obsession with its medical briefings problematic, given such briefings never happened elsewhere or have long ceased.

When I suggest that many Irish place greater trust in the NPHET team than the new Coalition, my friend suggests this “tells its own tale about the frayed relationship between Ireland’s Government and governed”.

When I call leading Irish communications consultant Terry Prone, she is full of praise for Ireland’s NPHET experts. The effectiveness of their briefings is clear, she says, in the high level of public compliance. As winter looms, however, she wonders if a constant diet of “knife-edge” and “tipping point” briefings could see people lose heart. Greater care and co-ordination of language is key, she thinks.

Another Irish friend called recently wishing Ireland would shift away from its NPHET-lead-and-communicated approach. When I asked why she doesn’t air her views at home – and maybe change minds – she said wearily: “Here in Ireland, we can only ever do one orthodoxy at a time.”

Shame

Times of stress and uncertainty trigger deep-seated and revealing instinctive responses in every people. While most people are getting on as best they can, the instinctive fallback of some on shame as a tool of control reminds me of a country many thought was dead and buried.

But the fear of denunciation and the whistle of swinging moral cudgels suggest that Catholic Ireland’s grave was a shallow one.

Left unchecked, the deep roots of shame in the Irish psyche, and a postcolonial compliance to authority, can trigger an urge to denounce as blasphemy – or smother in silence – critical questions. Such instincts in our present are reminders that our past is not really passed.

As a lay confessor to many worried friends in Ireland, all I can offer from Berlin is this timely German wisdom: anxiety is a poor adviser.

Derek Scally is Berlin Corespondent