While a vaccine to counter Covid-19 will hopefully save countless human lives, it will have one unintended side-effect. Its introduction will also probably alleviate (but not cure) the paralysis at Stormont, where this week’s protracted and shambolic process of decision-making has made the executive a by-word for incompetence.
An unfair assessment of our finest political brains, you say, but sadly this time you do not have a point, since it took the executive the best part of a week to decide whether to extend Covid-related restrictions.
Sinn Féin (after a change of heart) wanted the restrictions to continue. The DUP wanted the opposite. (Did you ever think the DUP would want pubs to open?) So in the best Stormont tradition, the parties began to negotiate.
In that same tradition, the DUP then used its veto to block two different proposals from health minister, Robin Swann, thereby preventing “negotiations” as most people understand the word. This illustrates the insanity of Stormont’s institutionalised sectarianism, which is now praised across the world from Dublin to Washington.
This veto system is a barrier to rational decision-making and an insult to democracy. (Those who praise it from afar do not have to live under it.) Despite criticism of the DUP, the executive supports the veto system.
So ministers sought a compromise, thereby moving the debate from the medical to the political, apparently unaware that viruses do not do compromise. They wondered if they could open cafes but not restaurants and then debated the difference between them.
(Maybe this will help them: an example of a restaurant is the dining room in Stormont where MLAs eat food subsidised by the taxpayer. A cafe is where those who fund the MLAs’ food go to eat out.)
So then they wondered if restaurants might serve food without alcohol. Surprisingly, they did not discuss if restaurants might serve white, but not red, wine and then ask restaurateurs to adjust their menus accordingly.
Meanwhile in the Stormont chamber, MLAs debated the regulations for a partial lockdown, which had been introduced three weeks earlier and which were due to expire four days later (although they thought it was three.) And there’s more. These regulations were debated alongside three other sets of regulations, including those introduced for Derry and Strabane on October 5 which had already been repealed, without ever having been debated or approved. (Are you listening Dublin and Washington?)
A Stormont coronavirus debate might have been expected to discuss, for example, more funding for medical research in our universities. But the only university-related proposal was UUP leader Steve Aiken’s call for Queen’s to create a professorship of unionism. (In pursuit of fairness, should we not also have professors of socialism, conservatism, liberalism, authoritarianism, populism, environmentalism and maybe even a bit of communism? But then Queen’s already has those. They are called politics professors, who also teach about unionism.)
So what are the chances of a vaccine to put Stormont out of our misery? As someone who has been assessing the ethics of medical research applications for over ten years, I would respectfully suggest that Pfizer’s claims of creating an effective virus needs significant clarification. Oddly, it is an initial finding, not the results of a completed study. It has no indication of how long it will offer immunity or whether it will protect the most vulnerable. If 94 people in the trial contracted the disease, is there a pattern in terms of age, medical condition or gender?
It would appear ethical to ask if Pfizer jumped the gun slightly to gain a marketing advantage over its competitors. We can only wait and see.
Meanwhile Stormont’s insanity continues. It might best be summed up by paraphrasing Russia’s revolutionary leader, Lenin, who said that politics is the most concentrated expression of economics. In Stormont’s case we might reasonably argue that politics is the most concentrated expression of hopelessness.
A vaccine may prolong Stormont’s life, but it will take more than medicine to confer it with competence.
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