"All Ireland Approach Essential As Lockdown Lifts" Breandán Mac Cionnaith
Éirígí For A New Republic spokesperson Breandán Mac Cionnaith has repeated the call for an all-Ireland approach to Covid-19. Speaking from Portadown, Co Armagh he said,
“Over 2,000 Irish people have died as a result of Covid-19 in the last two months. While this is a significant number of people, it would have been far higher had decisive action not been taken to flatten the curve of infection.
Thankfully the number of daily deaths and confirmed new cases has been steadily dropping over recent weeks. This has happened as a result of a massive collective national effort. From Antrim to Kerry and Wexford to Donegal, the Irish people have made huge personal and financial sacrifices to prevent our healthcare services becoming overwhelmed and to protect citizens within higher-risk groups.
Front-line workers and the wider population, not the politicians who ran down our health services for years, have won the first round of the fight against Covid-19. They should be rightly proud of the job that they have done.
Boris Johnson, following in a long tradition of British leaders who are willing to sacrifice British and Irish workers to protect capitalist interests.
However, the effort to defeat Covid-19 in Ireland has been consistently threatened by the actions and inactions of Boris Johnson’s government in London. His instinctive ideological response to the arrival of a deadly new pathogen was to essentially carry on as normal for as long as possible, sacrificing the lives of an unknown number of people to protect capitalist interests.
This strategy saw Britain lock down far later than almost every other country in Europe. As a result somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000 British people have already died as a result of Covid-19, leaving Britain with one of the highest per capita death rates in the world.
Unfortunately the impact of the British government’s Covid-19 strategy isn’t limited to Britain. The British occupation of the Six Counties and the current free movement between Ireland and Britain leaves all of Ireland uniquely exposed to Johnson’s reckless Covid-19 strategy.
Today we are again calling for a seamless all-Ireland approach to combating Covid-19. At this moment in time it appears that the disease has been largely contained across the country. We must now use our island status to full advantage by introducing health screening at all points of entry and supervised quarantine and testing for everyone entering the country.
Such an approach, combined with widespread, rapid testing and tracing will allow us the best chance to keep the virus at bay and allow the country to return very close to full normality within a relatively short time frame. Similar approaches are already working in China, Vietnam, South Korea and many other countries. A failure to adopt such an all-Ireland approach will leave all of Ireland at risk from Boris Johnson and the Tory government’s recklessness.”