The adults in the room can see the irreparable harm that closed schools do to pupils

Locally, apart from the brouhaha over transfer tests, little has been heard from Sinn Féin or the DUP about the vital interests of the families who vote for them.

Whilst Sinn Féin have predictably aligned themselves with teaching union leader Mary Bousted’s socialism for the professional classes, not to mention nationalist Ireland’s reflex mechanism to oppose anything associated with English Tories, the DUP seem to be retreating into a nationalism of their own.

They apparently share with Nicola Sturgeon a Calvinist determination not to be led by decadent upper class Englishmen.

The World Health Organisation special envoy Dr David Nabarro, interviewed on Dublin’s Newstalk radio last week, said the time has come to start reopening schools in the Republic “given Ireland’s progress on suppressing the virus to date”.

Given that Northern Ireland and the Republic have, for better or worse, now more or less dovetailed their response to Covid-19, and that their mortality rates and progress in suppressing the virus are so closely aligned, this is a call which should be reverberating north of the border as well.

Dr Nabarro warned that keeping children from school for too long can have long term effects on their development and that “you have to balance the risk” of that against their much reduced capacity to spread the virus as compared to adults.

Dr John Kyle, who is respected for his political efforts on behalf of the Protestant working classes, on these pages yesterday wrote about the damage to disadvantaged children from prolonged school closures (see link below).

Allison Morris of The Irish News, alongside Peter Hitchens on Sophy Ridge’s Sky News programme last week, pointed out how disastrous school closures are for working mothers and how hard being away from school for so long is for children “from socially deprived backgrounds and who don’t have access to online learning”.

With so many voices just stating ‘it is not safe,’ our children need more adults in the room like Dr Nabarro, Dr Kyle and Ms Morris who seem to realise that nothing is risk free but that school closures cause irreparable harm.

• John Kyle: Poorest children suffering most