Sam McBride: DUP and Sinn Féin unity around a slogan is empty – they still can’t agree a plan to tackle the pandemic

But for businesses, schools, doctors, and others hoping for an Executive finally uniting around a clear plan to which they will adhere, there is likely to be rapid disappointment.

The phrase which has brought together Arlene Foster and Michelle O’Neill is that “we have to learn to live with the virus”. It’s a snappy soundbite, but behind the unified strapline there is little evidence of a coherent position.

In fact, the manner in which the phrase has been deployed by them exposes the Executive’s failure to plan for the pandemic’s second wave now engulfing our hospitals.

Stormont’s leaders have known for ten months that covid would be with us for a prolonged period – and it was then that the language now being repeated first emerged.

In May, Mrs Foster said: “I think until we get to a point where we have a vaccine we’re going to have to learn to live with Covid-19.” A few weeks later, Sinn Fein junior minister Declan Kearney told the Assembly: “We will have to learn to live with the virus for an extended period.”

Thus, when Mrs Foster wrote in this newspaper three weeks ago that “every part of our society must adapt and learn to live with the virus”, it was not the radical departure from past policy which some read it to be, but the revival of an old slogan.

In that article, the DUP leader – at that point facing outspoken criticism of what she had just agreed from one of her own ministers, Edwin Poots – said that “we cannot keep closing the country down or forcing specific sectors to close in order to beat back this virus. That strategy, designed to buy time, is in reality a failure...”

Echoing that sentiment, a fortnight ago Ms O’Neill said that the restrictions had given Stormont a “window of opportunity” to make plans which will avoid the need for future lockdowns. But wishing something does not make it so.

Mrs Foster has been clear that the ‘circuit breaker’ restrictions will end next Friday. That pledge always allowed little room for her to react to the situation at that date. While case numbers have fallen substantially under the restrictions, they are still high. The doubling rate of the virus is now lower than in France or Germany, but above that of the US.

And while Germany views 50 new coronavirus infections per 100,000 people in a week as signalling serious danger, out of 79 Northern Ireland postcodes only one is beneath 100, and one is at 669 – far above what contact tracing is designed to handle.

What if hospitals next Friday are not coping? What then is the DUP and Sinn Féin’s alternative which will bring down case numbers without extending some of the restrictions now in place?

As I write, there are 37 patients in the emergency department at the Ulster Hospital waiting for a bed so that they can be admitted. Yet the demand for beds is so high that across the Northern Ireland’s hospitals there is a 101% bed occupancy rate (a figure possible because those on trolleys waiting for a bed are included in the data).

The DUP and Sinn Féin agreed last month that there was no alternative to these restrictions for one reason: There was no other way which they could find to allow hospitals to cope as the virus was running rampant.

They are the government and if there was an alternative they were free to implement it. That they did not demonstrates the paucity of alternatives coming from those parties who had months in which to plan to “live with” the virus.

The restrictions were the outcome of horsetrading between the DUP and Sinn Féin rather than some scientific process and now, having had more than three weeks in which to decide what would happen on November 13 when the current restrictions run out, the Executive still has no plan – nor even the outline of a plan.

That political failure means that businesses and others have no way of preparing – unless they have access to information not made public – to re-open in a few days’ time.

This chaotic approach is consistent with how the Executive has been handling things for months – and that goes to the vacuous heart of the unifying slogan that we must ‘live with the virus’.

Opponents of rolling restrictions have been unable to convincingly set out how society can function during this pandemic without the health system collapsing.

Even if the Executive was to accept the profound ethical problems of telling the old and the vulnerable to stay at home for many months or years, recent Executive papers show evidence that a major conduit of the virus into care homes (and presumably all homes of the most vulnerable) is via essential care staff.

An apparently clearer solution suggested by some has been to increase hospital capacity. To an extent, that has already been done with hundreds of retired former medics and students who had not even graduated being brought into hospitals and military logistic support.

But the health minister now says that the health service has secured most of the available staff, to the extent that he is no longer asking for money (the logic behind that is chilling, given how for years ‘give health more money’ was seen as the simple solution to problems; now even vast sums are not a solution) – hospitals now have more ventilators than can be staffed without cancelling life-saving operations.

And medics cannot be trained in a couple of weeks. Stormont is now paying for years of populist refusal – by almost every major party – to accept unpopular health reforms. By their nature, strategic failures rarely involve an immediate crises but delay only exacerbates the gravity of the consequences.

Ms O’Neill was herself health minister when in October 2016 the Department of Health had a role in Operation Cygnus, a major UK-wide training exercise to plan for a pandemic. What she knew about that exercise is unclear because the department has refused to release to this newspaper documentation from the period.

But she clearly knew there was a wider crisis in the health service, yet three months after that exercise she walked out of government and refused to allow the formation of a government for three years, despite warnings that urgent medical planning decisions were needed.

Prior to her tenure, successive DUP health ministers held the portfolio – yet few of the major reforms took place. And despite the enormous importance of the role, both parties ducked the chance to take the job in January, leaving it to the UUP’s Robin Swann to fill the post.

It may be that the DUP and Sinn Féin believe they can shovel the political blame over to the UUP health minister by accusing him of failing to increase NHS capacity.

Yet attacking a minister who has resolutely declined to score political points during this crisis, and who is shown by polling to be the minister most respected by the public while that polling shows Ms O’Neill is held in the lowest esteem, is unlikely to be successful politically.

But even if that succeeds in political terms, it will not solve the problem – nor be of any comfort to either the bereaved or the business owners hoping for competent and coherent leadership.

There are positives - testing has been massively increased and more reliable PPE supply lines appear to have been secured. And survival rates have increased significantly as global understanding of the virus improves. But much of that has happened despite the Executive, rather than because of it.

On Monday, the deputy first minister stood in the Assembly and said that the Executive was working on an “exit strategy” and that “we need to be able to communicate that well in advance of November 13 because we need people to have the information so that they can plan”.

Probably without realising, Ms O’Neill was giving away that at this late stage the Executive cannot communicate its plan because it does not have a plan.

Agreeing to ‘live with the virus’ was just another way of delaying the real decisions – but they can’t be delayed much longer.

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