Life in Lockdown

“As well-armed as the Parliamentary forces were, their deadliest weapon may have been the one they brought inadvertently. People in the town were now dying of a plague that had traveled with the English. Memories were all too fresh of the 1649 plague that had killed well over 3,000.”
   —Excerpt from the 2019 novel The Curse of Septimus Bridge

The above quote is a handy reminder that 1) plagues, endemics and pandemics have always been with us and 2) I actually wrote a novel called The Curse of Septimus Bridge. (For more information on that, as well as an update on my upcoming novel, see my book blog.)

History tells us that armies, explorers, conquistadores, holidaymakers and business travelers have, at various points in time, have helped spread virulent diseases from one territory to another. What is amazing is that, in this age of globalism and cheap-and-easy international travel, such outbreaks do not happen more often. Instead we appear to be going through a once-in-a-century phenomenon with the current crisis evoking mostly recollections of the 1918-1920 so-called Spanish flu pandemic.

That flu is estimated to have infected a third of the world’s population and killed, in the most liberal guesses, as many as 100 million. Then the world was much more defenseless than now. The ventilator would not be invented until several years later, and flu vaccines were decades away.

As the experts remind us, Covid-18 is not an influenza strain and so does not behave like one. That is what makes it scary. We are only learning as time goes on exactly how it behaves and just how dangerous it truly is.

There are signs of optimism if you want to look for them. For those of us in the majority who (as far as we know anyway) have not experienced it, the danger is more theoretical than real. For those who have had a mild or even asymptomatic case, the main concern is for others rather than for oneself. Perhaps the most optimistic sign is that many people’s nerves have relaxed enough that they have already moved past the old-wartime-style-let’s-all-pull-together mentality right to using the crisis as one more political football. I don’t spend much time listening to the White House daily briefings, but based on what I have heard they seem to contain a lot of useful and/or interesting information from government and health officials. When it comes to cable news, the president and his twitter account, though, he and the press corps seem more than content to just carry on the same noisy and distracting game in which they have engaged since the 2016 election.

Here in Ireland the we’re-all-in-this-together spirit still mostly prevails. A lot of that has to do with the fact that news coverage here is led by a dominant state broadcaster that has little space for unsanctioned views or contrarian attitudes at a time like this. There is much collective self-back-patting at the Irish response, frequently drawing meaningless, self-flattering comparisons to other (much larger) countries, particular the UK and the US.

Having said that, there is a growing criticism, or at least collective regret, that the authorities were blindsided by the number of fatalities in nursing homes. With the benefit of hindsight it now seems clear that, while citizens in general were told to hunker down in their homes, not enough attention was given to the vulnerable elder population residing in clusters. This is probably because the planners were watching what was going on hotspots like China and Italy where living and family arrangements are more traditional than here. Ireland has become more like America in that the old folks are more likely to be sent off to a home.

For the average news consumer it is difficult to gauge exactly how bad things are in general. On one hand we see disturbing images of pine coffins stacked on top of each other in a trench on New York’s Hart Island as well as similar photos from Spain and Italy. On the other hand, there is the article in today’s Wall Street Journal about results of hundreds of blood tests taken in Los Angeles. Echoing similar stories from Europe, the emerging picture is that a lot more people than expected have antibodies for Covid-19, suggesting the rate of serious illness and fatalities among those exposed is actually quite a bit lower than previously thought.

I guess that’s a perverse kind of optimism. Another example is the fact that some people are emboldened to go out—against health expert advice—and protest restrictions imposed by authorities. People have marched or found other ways of protesting in such far-flung places as Michigan, Washington, Texas, France, Germany, India and Chile. Others have more cautiously done their protesting online. These are clearly signs of pent-up frustration at the personal and economic restrictions as well as local-issue-fueled discontent. The protestors are willing to test the assertion they risk spreading the disease more widely. In the process, they have become a political litmus test in the debate between those who want everyone to heed government/expert advice/diktats and those who subscribe to the spirit, which was big in the 1960s, of “question authority.”

The other night, protesting fishermen in Dingle, County Kerry, prevented the docking of Spanish-owned trawler for fear of introducing more virus cases. Were they perhaps thinking back a whole century to the Spanish flu?

Government Self-isolation

“Ireland Officially Changes Covid-19 Status From ‘Be Grand’ To ‘Alright, Fair Enough’ ”
 —Headline on the satirical Irish web site Waterford Whispers News on Thursday

Remember a while back when I gloated that countries that have the parliamentary system, like Ireland, get their campaigns and elections over with quickly and do not drag their citizens through endless months and years of electioneering? Well, the flip side of that is that, under the parliamentary system, once the election is over, sometimes you can be waiting weeks or months for a government to be formed.

An extreme example of this was the Belgian election of 2010. Prime Minister Yves Leterme resigned on April 26 of that year, and the election was held on June 13. It took until November of 2011 for a government to be formed. Leterme wound up serving as a caretaker head of government for 589 days.

The root causes of the deadlock lay in the country’s division between the Flemish and the Walloons, Belgian peoples who not only have different cultures but who literally speak different languages. Things got so bad that, at one point, separatist Walloons had talks with the president of France and the French Socialist Party about becoming a new region of France.

So how are things going in Ireland, which had its election on February 8? More than a month later there is still no government. Is there any danger Dublin will break Brussels’ record for government-forming negotiations? Not likely, given the seriousness of Brexit and, more immediately, the coronavirus emergency. The latter particularly seems to leave no room for more of the game-playing that the various parties were happy to indulge in at first. Anything that cancels everything from St. Patrick’s Day to GAA matches to Mass is pretty serious business.

Here’s my own assessment of the government situation, for what it’s worth (probably not much). Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and Fine Gael each won roughly a quarter of the seats in Dáil Éireann. The remainder went to various smaller parties and independents. How do you fit that jigsaw puzzle together? Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are perfectly compatible ideologically but hate the idea of a “grand coalition” between them for historical reasons and the likely real perception that such a deal would only shrink their support further, helping the left in the long run. Fine Gael in particular appears anxious to go into opposition, calculating that is in its best long-term interest.

The Green Party with its 12 seats is in the kingmaker seat, as they are the only easy completing piece to a combination of any two of the larger parties. The Greens, however, were badly burned the last time they were a junior coalition partner, so they are holding firm on either getting to call the shots or opting for a national unity government. Sinn Féin, which has never been in government in the republic, seems anxious to get in, but the other large parties have varying levels of mistrust.

The national unity idea (a government of all elected TDs) has gained force with the intensifying Covid-19 pressure. However good it may sound in a Kumbaya sort of way, though, it would be awfully unwieldy in practice.

The likely outcome, as least as it appears as of this writing, is a FF/FG/Greens arrangement, but who would lead it? Outgoing Taoiseach Leo Varadkar only seems interested if there is a rotating Taoiseach arrangement. Another idea that has been floated is to make the leader of the smallest coalition partner (the Greens’ Eamon Ryan) the head of government. This might assuage left-leaning voters, who are certain to feel bitterly cheated by a FF/FG government. Those parties are all too aware that the only reasons that Sinn Féin does not have an outright plurality of seats is because 1) FF got a freebie because one of their members happened to be the Ceann Comhairle (lower house speaker) and so retained his seat automatically and 2) Sinn Féin did not put forward more candidates who, it is now clear, would have been elected. To add even more pressure, the first opinion poll after the election showed a huge jump in support for Sinn Féin, meaning that a new election might well turn out even worse for the other two main parties, resulting in a Sinn Féin-led government.

It is worth noting that the concerns about Sinn Féin are not without merit. The party seems to have an awful lot of money on hand and, even taking into account a multi-million-pound bequeathal in a quirky, old, radical Englishman’s will last year, the source of its funding is by no means entirely clear. Furthermore, the highest levels of the party’s decision-making are frustratingly opaque, which does nothing to dispel concerns that the old IRA Army Council, or some variation of it, is still calling the shots.

It is still an open question how the next Irish government will be formed. One hopes it will not take as long as Belgium a decade ago. An interesting question is whether, as in the Belgian case, an extended deadlock will spur some—even more than already—toward thoughts of realigning national borders.

Populism’s Popularity

“Irish Parties Put Their Car Keys in a Bowl as Coalition Talks Begin”
 —Headline on the satirical Irish web site Waterford Whispers News on Monday

What exactly is a populist? It’s a word that you hear a lot, and perhaps you even use it yourself. Do we all understand and mean the same thing when it is used?

For a while now my own handy definition of populist has been a politician who is very popular but whom I personally do not like. That is because the word usually seems to be used in negative connotation, usually in relation to President Trump.

I have now gone to the trouble of looking up the dictionary meaning, and this is what at least one online dictionary says: “A person, especially a politician, who strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition is even simpler, not mentioning elites: “A person who seeks to represent or appeal to the interests of ordinary people.” That suggests that, if you consider the word populist some kind of epithet, then it must be because you have little regard for the concerns of “ordinary people.”

In a democracy isn’t appealing to most people, presumably including ordinary people, the whole point of the exercise? Yet in many uses of the word populist I get a sense that the word’s target is branded as manipulating or deceiving simple-minded folks. I suppose it comes down to one’s confidence in the judgment of the electorate as a whole.

The dictionary definition does not ascribe any particular ideology to populism, so pretty much any politician—left, right or center—can be one, as long as his or her rhetoric is aimed squarely at ordinary folks. President Trump certainly qualifies, but you would have to say that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren do as well. Their clear message is that ordinary people are being exploited by the rich and powerful. In Ireland I think you could say that, similarly, Mary Lou McDonald, head of the Sinn Féin party, qualifies as a populist. She claims to speak on behalf of ordinary people in rejecting policies of the two parties that have governed the Irish republic since its founding.

Since very few politicians would claim not to represent the interests of ordinary people, does the term populist have any meaning at all—other than to to frighten the supporters of longtime, well-established politicians or parties?

If we think of populism as simply a rejection of politics as usual, then there is certainly a lot of it around.

Having now won a popular plurality in the first two Democratic primary contests, Sanders is certainly worrying the “elites” in his party. Is it more important that he came in first in New Hampshire, though, or that candidates more “moderate” than he and Elizabeth Warren (Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden) collectively took more than half the vote? That depends on whether Democratic voters are mostly making their choices by looking at the candidates through a left/moderate prism or through an electable/non-electable lens. In voters’ minds candidates are unlikely to shift between left and moderate lanes, but they can easily move been electable and non-electable categories. Joe Biden, for example, seems to be making such a transition.

Of course, the U.S. primaries are merely the first stage of the presidential election. Once the two parties have their nominees, then we will move on to the final vote in November.

In Ireland, the process is a bit more complicated, but with any luck it will be a lot less time-consuming. The country has the results of its general election, which was held on Saturday, and now a government has to be formed. Since no party has a particularly sizeable plurality—let alone a majority—the top vote-getting parties must enter into negotiations to work out some kind of governing coalition or arrangement.

Of the 160 seats in Dáil Éireann, 38 have gone to Fianna Fáil, 37 to Sinn Féin, 35 to Fine Gael (the incumbent governing party), and 12 to the Green Party. The remaining 38 seats are spread out over a collection of smaller parties and independent politicians. If you enjoy a good round of Sudoku, then have fun trying to put together a combination of those numbers to get to or above the governing threshold of 80.

The simplest solution on paper is a “grand coalition” of the two establishment parties (Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael) plus the Greens, but there are a whole lot of reasons why that is a problem for at least two of those parties. For one thing the Greens—as well as Labour (which tallied a mere 6 seats this time) and the now-extinct Progressive Democrats—have previously seen their fortunes seriously dashed by going into coalition with one of the big parties. Fianna Fáil has also been burned by propping up Fine Gael for the past four years. Such arrangements do nothing to dispel the increasingly popular notion that FF and FG are merely two wings of a single virtual political party.

Mindful that Sinn Féin actually won the popular vote and would have actually won the most seats if they had only run more candidates, the big parties seem content for now to let McDonald see what she can manage by combining her party’s 37 seats with those of smaller parties and independents. If she succeeds—and it has to be seen as a pretty darn big if—it will result in a history-making “coalition of the left.”

It will also mark a stunning triumph of populism.