Covid response gets injection of urgency but no immunity from scandals (2024)

The year began with first jabs and ended with boosters. In early January, Tony Holohan, chief medical officer, confirmed that a new South African variant of Covid-19 had been detected in Ireland. Between Beta and Omicron — the dominant strain today, also first reported in South Africa — 2021 was a year in which we became overly familiar with the Greek alphabet and the language of vaccines.

A few days into the new year, a 95-year-old woman became the first nursing home resident in Ireland to receive the Pfizer vaccine. On the same day, an infectious disease consultant in the Mater University hospital became the first healthcare worker to receive a shot. In the early weeks of the year the country hunkered down for months of a Level 5 lockdown that was not eased until April. It was, according to a report from Oxford University, “one of the harshest coronavirus lockdowns in the world”.

Life did not stop entirely, however. In January the harsh conditions in Ireland’s mother and baby homes were laid bare in a landmark report. About 9,000 children died in these institutions between 1922 and 1998. The report confirmed that children had been used in pharmaceutical trials led by “legacy companies” of Glaxo- SmithKline. GSK announced an “enhanced information service” about the trials but refused to pay reparations.

In the same month that the report was published, thousands of complaints were made against RTE over a comedy sketch, broadcast on New Year’s Eve 2020, which depicted God as a rapist. Eamon Martin, Ireland’s Catholic primate, described the skit as blasphemous, and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland upheld ten complaints. Colm Williamson, the author of the sketch and editor of satirical website Waterford Whispers News, would later remark that the piece received more complaints than the “horrific” details of the mother and baby homes report.

Religion was back on the agenda in November when three politicians brought a legal challenge against the constitutional oath that requires Irish presidents to swear to “almighty God” when taking office. Despite support from President Higgins for the oath’s removal, the European Court of Human Rights deemed the case “inadmissible”.

Spiritual affairs ran alongside temporal controversies. In March three senior executives at Davy Stockbrokers resigned after the Central Bank of Ireland fined the company €4.1 million. It found that the group had behaved “recklessly” in handling a transaction between a client and a consortium that consisted of 16 Davy staff. An investigation found that the broker had failed “to identify and manage a potential conflict of interest between Davy employees and a Davy client . . . and ensure transparency” with the company’s compliance arm.

In May the Health Service Executive, already reeling from Covid-19, was almost brought to its knees after a cyberattack, purportedly from Russian hackers, which spread malware and ransomware across its network. “Weaknesses” in HSE computer systems had been flagged in annual reports for two years in a row, in particular its use of out-of-date software. The service, it transpired, had not upgraded 37,000 of its computers from Microsoft Windows 7 to Windows 10. The attack led to wider questions about the state’s approach to cybersecurity and protection of information.

While the HSE’s digital walls caved in, homeowners in counties along the west coast faced the prospect of physical wrecking balls. Blocks used in the construction of about 7,000 homes in Donegal, Mayo and other counties had turned out to be defective and were causing them to crumble “like Weetabix”, according to one campaigner. In June, a protest in Dublin brought the mica redress scheme to national attention. The government has set the compensation cap for house repairs at €350,000 for each household, which campaigners described as “disappointing”.

On the political spectrum, all eyes turned to America at the start of the year when supporters of the outgoing president Donald Trump stormed the Capitol building in Washington. A reporter from Kerry was at the scene. “CNN just introduced a reporter called Donie O’Sullivan,” the comedian Dara Ó Briain wrote on Twitter. “Fair dues, he sounds exactly like you’d hope.” On January 20, Micheál Martin, the taoiseach, congratulated Joe Biden on his inauguration as the 46th president of the United States, while Trump continued to cry foul play.

Irish politicians proved more than capable of creating their own controversies. Leo Varadkar, the tanaiste, faced scrutiny all year after it emerged that he had leaked a contract between the Department of Health and the Irish Medical Organisation to Maitiú Ó Tuathail, the head of a rival doctors’ organisation whom Varadkar later described as “not a close friend”. In April, detectives from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation interviewed Varadkar about the leak, which took place in 2019, while he was taoiseach. Varadkar and Ó Tuathail denied knowingly breaking the law, and garda sources suggested Varadkar was unlikely to be prosecuted, but the criminal inquiry trundles on.

Varadkar was also forced to defend his role in the controversy surrounding Katherine Zappone, a former children minister who was appointed as a UN special envoy during the summer. Documents released by government revealed Zappone was told of her appointment four months before cabinet agreed to it. Varadkar and Simon Coveney, the minister for foreign affairs who proposed Zappone’s appointment without consulting coalition party leaders, were accused of political patronage.

Varadkar dismissed accusations of cronyism as “nonsense” but apologised for his presence at an outdoor 50-person event, hosted by Zappone, at the Merrion hotel in Dublin in July. Zappone said she was “assured” by the hotel that the event was “in compliance with government Covid-19 restrictions and guidelines”. She ultimately declined her UN role, with the scandal threatening to engulf the Fine Gael leadership.

In Northern Ireland — against a backdrop of unrest driven in part by discontent over the Northern Ireland protocol in the Brexit deal — Arlene Foster was also out of a job. Her six-year tenure as DUP leader effectively ended in April when 75 per cent of the party’s assembly members signed a letter demanding a leadership contest. “The future of unionism and Northern Ireland will not be found in division,” the outgoing first minister said. “It will only be found in sharing this place we are privileged to call home.”

Foster had a better run than her successor. After less than a month in the position Edwin Poots resigned as DUP leader after an internal revolt. He became the shortest-serving leader in the history of the party. Sir Jeffrey Donaldson then stepped into the hot seat.

President Higgins was criticised by unionists in September when he decided not to attend a church service in Armagh that was held to mark the centenary of Northern Ireland. Charlie Flanagan, a Fine Gael TD, described Higgins’s stance as a “setback for reconciliation”. Higgins defended his position, saying the event was not a “neutral statement politically”.

New TV dramas provided a respite from the pandemic. Kin, RTE’s familial crime series, packed an A-list cast — including Ciarán Hinds, Aidan Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy — and a glossy Dublin setting that looked like The Sopranos crossed with Fair City. Also on the small screen the mystery of the 1996 murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, a French TV producer, was resurrected for two true-crime dramas, one from Jim Sheridan on Sky and another, Sophie: A Murder in West Cork, on Netflix.

The Sally Rooney juggernaut dominated the printed fiction market. Within a few days of the September publication of her new book, Beautiful World, Where Are You, she had sold 13,000 copies in Ireland and another 40,000 in the UK. She is a reluctant celebrity but she courted controversy by refusing permission for Modan, an Israeli publisher, to translate her book into Hebrew, claiming the company did not “publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people”. Rooney said she was open to selling the rights to any Hebrew publisher that complied with guidelines that had been put in place by the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.

In March, Denise Chaila, a Limerick rapper and singer, won best album and a €10,000 prize at the RTE Choice Music Prize awards. It was a rare bright moment in a grim year for the live entertainment industry. While sporting champions made their mark on the world — Kellie Harrington of Dublin won an Olympic gold medal for her lightweight boxing win, and Rachael Blackmore of Tipperary become the first woman to win the Grand National — stages across the country were dark for most of the year.

In the absence of live entertainment, we made do with walrus-spotting. An 800kg (125st) Arctic walrus was first spotted off Valentia Island in March. Wally the Walrus, as he became known, was sinking a couple of boats in every harbour he entered, according to the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group. Growing numbers of “walrus watchers” prompted Malcolm Noonan, the heritage minister, to issue a statement on Wally, telling people to watch him from a distance. “This is for the animal’s sake but also for your own,” Noonan warned. Wally then visited Wales, England, France and Spain before stopping off again in Ireland. He is now believed to be in Iceland.

The organisers of Electric Picnic held out hope that their festival would proceed in September, especially after 40,000 people were permitted to attend the All-Ireland Senior Hurling Final at Croke Park, but it was eventually cancelled. Other landmark events also fell foul of Covid-19, including St Patrick’s Day parades, the Rose of Tralee and the Dublin marathon. Live music fans, particularly those of a country and western persuasion, remain optimistic about the coming year, with more than 500,000 tickets being sold for Garth Brooks concerts at Croke Park next September.

The courts were the place for live action. In May, the Sunday Independent sacked Eoghan Harris, a columnist and former senator, who had allegedly criticised journalists, academics and others while using a pseudonym on Twitter. Several began legal actions against Harris, including the journalist Aoife Grace Moore.

The writer, in turn, filed defamation proceedings against Moore over comments she made about him.

In September, Paddy Cosgrave and David Kelly, joint founders of the Web Summit, also found themselves at loggerheads in an increasingly bitter and personal High Court dispute. Cosgrave claimed that Kelly cut him out of plans for a lucrative tech fund, while Kelly argued that Cosgrave had used company resources for his own purposes. Daire Hickey, a third founder of the company, has also lodged a High Court action against Cosgrave.

In November, three men were found guilty of the 2019 abduction and torture of Kevin Lunney, a businessman, and were given sentences ranging from 18 to 30 years. A fourth man was found not guilty. The alleged “paymaster” behind the abduction and torture of the Quinn Industrial executive could face “life in prison” when uncovered, warned the judge.

As the year ends, with the Omicron variant of Covid-19 in circulation, people queueing for vaccines, and the hospitality and entertainment industries facing a new set of restrictions, the public could be forgiven for thinking it is like the start of the year all over again.

But research from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the World Health Organisation, published in early December, has suggested that the sacrifices were worthwhile: more than 9,000 lives in Ireland were saved by vaccines.