So it may be sobering for us to reflect on something that the British have done, and on which we have scandalously dragged our feet and procrastinated. While we have offered up excuses, many of them poor and unconvincing, for inaction, next door they have got on with the job of investigating what happened during the covid pandemic.

Evidence has been taken at open hearings, politicians and experts have been quizzed, the first conclusions on preparedness (it was lamentably outdated) and plans for the future have been made public. Much more is to follow with further modules delivering their own verdicts and recommendations.

It is possible to feel a moment of sympathy for Tánaiste Micheál Martin when he was forced to blow the cobwebs off yet another vague pledge — there have been at least six — to set up an inquiry into what happened in Ireland during covid-19.

But only for a moment.

Mr Martin, who prefers to describe the process as a “review”, was taoiseach between June 2020 and December 2022.

He made his first commitment to “an evaluation” in January 2022. Others have walked down this path. Leo Varadkar before and after and, subsequently, Simon Harris.

Now Mr Martin, speaking in Ethiopia, says the process will be in place before mid-September. He expressed regret that it has not happened yet.

Mr Martin should not take sole blame for this prolonged hiatus, although he has been a key player throughout. But this collective failure of government has a number of unacceptable consequences.

Principal among them is that citizens are left relying on memoirs, journalistic analysis, social media commentary, and partial reports seeping into the public domain to distil the experience of what happened in the Republic during this period.

In just one recent example, a study carried out under the banner of the ESRI found that covid infection rates were 50% higher in the poorest parts of the country.  

The researchers concluded that this was driven by a range of factors, including types of employment, reliance on public transport, higher occupancy in homes, and poorer general health.

No one in the Government is keen to replicate the exposure of the British inquiry which broadcast its hearings and was deemed “adversarial” in its nature. But to conduct our version with limited public access and significant levels of investigation behind closed doors will be a signal mistake and will compound the distrust that was generated by the wide remit given to the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) during the crisis.

The covid pandemic produced the biggest restrictions on liberty in Irish peacetime and destroyed families and livelihoods. 

As we witnessed on Friday with the worldwide tech outage we are, as a nation, underprepared in matters of general and urgent civil defence.

This needs to change and the Government, which has been delinquent in its approach, must recognise its responsibilities.

Ensuring all our systems are secure

One of Michael McGrath’s legacies to the Irish people when he departs for Europe may reside in the prosaically named Access to Cash General Scheme.

It was originally conceived as a response to a situation whereby banks and retailers were rushing to phase out their handling of hard currency and effectively browbeating more than 20% of the Irish population into changing the way in which they pay for goods and services.

In 2023, the total value of card transactions in the Republic amounted to over €90bn, compared to €13bn of cash withdrawals over the same period. Significantly, for a country with an ageing population, many people over the age of 55 prefer to handle their money in paper and coin.

While this legislation has the laudable aim of keeping ATMs within the reach of where people live — encouraging business to keep accepting cash — the gathering momentum of technical failures here and around the world re-emphasises the importance of maintaining an alternative to electronic transactions as a means of commerce and trade.

Those people who like to keep an emergency float of cash around their person or dwelling will have viewed Friday’s meltdown — which took down cash machines — with some equanimity, a feeling they will share with Mac users and those deploying the Linux operating system.

Not feeling so blessed are the passengers of more than 1,000 flights affected airlines, including Ryanair, Aer Lingus, KLM, United, Delta, and Jetstar.

While the online security firm Crowdstrike confirmed that the fault was not a cyber-attack, the list of problems created by the world’s ever-increasing dependence on network technologies is increasing relentlessly.

This week shoppers experienced chaos when the card payment system at Supervalu, Ireland’s third largest grocery chain, went down. Customers were unable to use their plastic to pay for shopping with the retailer only accepting cash for a number of hours. What would have happened if this had coincided with a failure of ATMs is a question worth considering.

When you calculate the frequency of crooks and scammers and “ransomware as a service” villains, then our growing reliance on, and faith in, technology assumes grim proportions.

In recent weeks, the US telecom giant said “nearly all” its customer phone and text records were stolen from a third-party cloud service. Ticketmaster was attacked for Taylor Swift tickets. The British health service has not yet recovered from an attack — believed to have been carried out by the Russian group Qilin — last month. Hundreds of operations and appointments have been cancelled as a consequence.

Our own HSE was the victim of a debilitating and malevolent incursion three years ago. Happily for everyone, it did not fall over in the current Microsoft problems.

System integrity and resilience is as important an issue for society as is our readiness to deal with major health problems. The concept of a shared civil defence is something which was a high priority during the Cold War era.

We need to attach greater importance to it during the turbulent 2020s and beyond.