IT is no longer appropriate to treat the whole country as just one zone for the purposes of fighting Covid-19, according to Clare TD and Chairman of the Oireachtas Covid-19 committee, Michael McNamara.
He believes that Ireland is not too small to divide into different zones, while he said official reluctance to do so reflects a tendency to focus on the needs of Dublin solely. “Ireland is small, but it’s not that small. It’s not Luxembourg. It’s big enough to break it into sections if they wanted to, but the tendency in Ireland, increasingly, is what’s good for Dublin is good for the rest of the country and what’s bad for the rest of the country doesn’t really matter.”
He said that it would be possible to introduce different restrictions for different counties. “It would depend on the medical advice but I would have thought counties (are zones that could have different regulations from each other). I mean if you can lock down Leicester you can lock down a county.”
While there have been 369 cases of Covid-19 in Clare, up until Wednesday there had only been one confirmed in almost six weeks. Dublin has just over 11 times Clare’s population, but has more than 33 times as many confirmed cases of the virus.
Mr McNamara said the capital is much more likely to see a second wave than other areas. “Realistically with the transmission rate in Dublin compared to the rest of the country, I would have thought it is the place you are most likely to have a resurgence of that nature. There’s no certainty it’ll happen there, and I hope it doesn’t, but I’m just saying if it does happen somewhere it’s more likely to happen in Dublin.”
In a Dáil debate on July 16, Mr McNamara put it to the Tánaiste that it is time to take a more nuanced approach and recognise there are different risks in different parts of Ireland.
“Does the Tánaiste accept that the R-nought rate in Dublin is now running at twice the level of the rate in the rest of the country? Does he agree that it is no longer appropriate to treat the country as one region and that we need, in the forthcoming legislation, to differentiate between places where there is a different R-nought rate? That is what almost every other country in the world is now doing; certainly, every country in Europe is doing it. Will the legislation to be introduced next week differentiate between Dublin, where the R-nought rate is twice as high as it is in the rest of the country, with regard to the restrictions which are proportionate and necessary?”
However Mr Varadkar was against changing the one-size-fits-all element of policy, although he said it may happen in the future. “The legislation we will introduce next week will not make that distinction, but I do not rule out the possibility, further down the line, of having different rules for different regions and different parts of Ireland. However, this is not straightforward. If we open pubs in one part of the country, we will see people travelling from other parts to where the measures are less restrictive. We need to bear that in mind. Counties in Ireland are not like states in Australia or the länder in Germany. Ireland is a small country and it is very easy to get around quickly. If we do not have different restrictions in different areas, we must bear in mind that there may be pull factors that bring the virus into a particular area.”
Owen Ryan has been a journalist with the Clare Champion since 2007, having previously worked with a number of other publications in Limerick, Cork and Galway. His first book will be published in December 2024.