The Spring lockdown of 2020 was all about emergency. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, bruised from a disastrous election and immersed in the tortuous process of trying to form a government with the Green Party, were ill-prepared for the scale of crisis generated by the Covid 19 pandemic.  The weakness of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s position as leader of a caretaker government, coupled with his own background as a medic, appeared to generate a disproportionate level of deference to the government’s most senior health advisor, Chief Medical Officer, Dr Tony Holohan. While the CMO took the lead in defining the narrative…