North of the border it was another bittersweet reminder of how near we are, and how far away.
The candles in the windows on Saturday night were suggested by President Higgins as cheer against threatening despair and a sign of thanks to health workers. In the long, bittersweet tradition of watching for the latecomer, the returning emigrant, the homeless wanderer, many burned night-long. They turned up in windows modest and showy, Dublin Airport’s control tower, lanterns around Michael D and Sabina Higgins on the steps of the Áras.
The Republic is an unequal state. The fact that its current government has had no electoral standing for nearly two months has not stopped Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin planning a replacement that omits Sinn Féin, narrowly but decisively more popular with February’s voters. But with all its faults the south has what the north has never had, a sense of itself that all its citizens, at least nominally, can share. The good-hearted Higgins style, welcoming the radical steps on same sex marriage and abortion that have transformed at least the face of Irish society, shines it out.
And the temptation at the minute is to turn away from the bad and dwell on the best - that made-over Shankill ice-cream van carrying milk and sanitiser, GAA clubs stocking foodbanks, countless examples of the young and not-so young supporting the vulnerable. Please let us not see – no, too late - Priti Patel, the anti-immigrant British home secretary, child of immigrants, allowed at last on Saturday to host a government briefing, apologising ‘if people feel there have been failings’ in providing health care workers with personal protective equipment (PPE).
‘If,’ she said, though the conservative, cautious Royal College of Nursing had just advised members deprived of PPE that they could refuse to treat patients, even though that might open them to charges of manslaughter.
Sent out after Patel to face the cameras, and as the figures roll in to prove how dependent the NHS is on immigrant skills, Business Secretary and immigrant Alok Sharma refused to apologise even as much as Patel had. His government has ‘a plan’ to get PPE to the frontline, he insisted. But the trouble was that he followed Patel and before her the health secretary Matt Hancock. Hancock’s twin offerings in the same crass vein were to say that some could make their PPE last longer, and to reject the suggestion that this might be the right moment to increase nurses’ pay.
Last Thursday yet another of Boris Johnson’s hopeless ministers put his foot in it, this time Dominic Raab claiming that coronavirus ‘made us think long and hard about who the key workers are’. The Guardian’s acute Marina Hyde noted that on the same day Patel’s Home Office slipped out its new guidance on ‘points-based’ immigration, which explained that there would ‘not be an immigration route specifically for those who do not meet the skills or salary threshold for the skilled worker route.’
When this nightmare lifts, prating about the low-paid and their importance in ‘our lives’ will not translate easily, if at all, into fairness for newly-recognised ‘key workers’. Nor for progress promised, but still vulnerable. The candle on a kitchen table posted by the actor Siobhán McSweeney flamed with the spirit of a sarcastic, sensible, good-hearted nun, to at least some northerners, because McSweeney plays the character Sister Michael from Derry Girls. ‘I light a candle here in the middle of London,’ she wrote, ‘hoping its warmth and light will comfort the sick and give strength to our amazing frontline staff.’
The actor marches for reproductive rights, and was vocal last week as that effort was made to roll back the decriminalisation Westminster forced through here. If that is even what the effort was. Surely nobody was merely playing to the gallery, posturing for their own diehards as guardians of traditional morality? Now that would be sick.
