Newton Emerson: Minding the cross-Border vaccine gap

The Northern Ireland executive is due to reveal its roadmap out of lockdown on Monday. The announcement will be several hours late if precedent is any guide and several days late if the DUP decides to have an argument over reopening schools.

Whenever the dates and details emerge, it should put to rest concerns of a prolonged, significant cross-Border difference in the epidemic. Northerners will not be skipping around in the sunshine after Easter while southerners stay confined until summer or beyond. The vaccine gap that has caused this scenario to be increasingly speculated upon in the Republic should be closing fast within one to two months and effectively gone within three, assuming plans remain on schedule.

That would still be a long time for substantial cross-Border differences. However, serious lockdown measures are likely to continue in the North for another three months. The Republic will be slightly ahead of Northern Ireland on opening schools and might be only slightly behind on reopening hospitality.

Stormont is inclined to caution: there is inevitable inertia and disagreement in a five-party coalition, most easily resolved by falling back on scientific advisers who will never recommend haste.

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Like the British government, Northern Ministers are haunted by mistakes made last year on locking down late and reopening early. Sinn Féin and the DUP have learned repeatedly that the public wants consensus. The DUP appears to need to learn this again, having started an argument this week over earlier reopening of schools.

Flights of speculation

This is not an instance of unionists blindly following England – a nationalist slur that has bedevilled Stormont decision-making. It is the DUP creating a wedge issue and a distraction as it flounders around hopelessly over Brexit. There is no sign of the party using its executive veto to escalate the argument further.

Once there are plans from both sides of the Border to compare, it should be evident that differences will not be much beyond the scale experienced so far – matters of weeks rather than months, and specific restrictions on shops and services rather than throwing open whole sectors of society and the economy.

That should put an end to wilder flights of speculation, or at least put them in a realistic context. It will not be necessary to seal the Border to stop infected hordes of southerners returning from northern pubs, cinemas and hotels. The continued level of enforcement against unnecessary travel should suffice. There is no urgent need for vaccine passports within the island of Ireland: even for the next few months, there will not be enough North/South differences in public health and social restrictions to warrant them.

The focus of all-Ireland co-ordination needs to shift away from lockdown arguments to a vaccine-era mindset. Population immunity North and South is about to converge at a very high level. People of a certain age will recognise the concept of “an acceptable level of coronavirus”. Agreeing what that level is and how to cope with it is the next political challenge. The public will mainly notice this through social distancing requirements. For government, the big question will be how much extra capacity to keep in healthcare systems. If acceptable levels are not closely aligned, one jurisdiction could cause the other to suddenly run out of intensive care beds.

Patrician benevolence

The short era of the vaccine gap has provoked outbreaks of vaccine nationalism and vaccine diplomacy.

As soon as the UK pulled ahead of the EU, politicians and the media in Britain suggested Ireland should be first in line for surplus doses. However well-intentioned, there has been a patrician benevolence to much of this that will have grated on many ears. It recalls the loan the UK gave Ireland after the financial crash, which came to be resented the more it was portrayed as generosity.

A similar debate on vaccines is pointless, as should shortly be clear. By the time the UK has surplus doses, Ireland will have plenty of its own. Questions about security of supply for both countries and any co-ordination they consider necessary can then be addressed on a long-term, partnership basis.

The vaccine nationalism of the past few months has revealed a new layer of identity in Ireland: European nationalism. It seems able to hold as potent a sway over large numbers of people as its Irish or British versions. Sufferers are certainly as willing to call day night and excuse the inexcusable. Quibbling over rates of first and second doses and the delay between them is the sort of dishonest tribal apologism the North is wearily familiar with. Now the whole of Ireland can enjoy it on an extra level.

As a product of Brexit, this will not be going away as the vaccine gap closes.

It adds another dimension to the rivalry between North and South and the UK and Ireland that has characterised far too much of the politics of the epidemic.