Annual Lecture 2022: Emergency Powers and the Executive: Reflections on the Past and a Vision for the Future - Remarks by Jack Horgan-Jones and Hugh O’Connell

• Pages: pp 183 - 188
• Published date: 12 July 2022
• Date: 12 July 2022

183

ANNUAL LECTURE 2022:

EMERGENCY POWERS AND THE

EXECUTIVE: REFLECTIONS ON THE PAST

AND A VISION FOR THE FUTURE

Remarks by

JACK HORGANJONES AND HUGH O’CONNELL*

Jack Horgan-Jones**

Around this time last year, myself and Hugh decided there was likely a book in

COVID-19. e reason we thought this is because COVID-19 had taken over

our professional lives but also to a large extent our personal lives so we thought,

why not heap misery upon misery and write a book on top of doing our day jobs.

It is not surprising that COVID-19 gave rise to the opportunity to write a book

because it was a kind of all-encompassing, society-consuming challenge that arrived

into the State with very little warning.

When we made the decision to write the book, we ploughed through our contact

books, we peppered people with requests, we annoyed them, we threatened them

in some instances, to sit down with us, and we ended up interviewing scores of

people. e last headcount before we stopped counting was somewhere between

90 and 100 people, all of whom were centrally involved in the pandemic. We had

an archive of people that we interviewed, many of whom generously sat with us for

hours and discussed the evolution of the policy response to the pandemic. On top

of that we assembled a trove of thousands of pages of documents, some of which

were passed to us by sources, some of which we obtained under the Freedom of

Information Act 2014 and, most of which, if not all of which, were previously

unpublished.

* Authors of Pandemonium: Power, Politics and Ireland’s Pandemic (Gill Books 2022). Any views or

opinions expressed in this piece are the personal views and opinions of the authors.

** Jack Horgan-Jones is a political reporter with e Irish Times, where he has worked since 2019.

He has covered politics, business, news and current aairs for the paper and before that, with e

Sunday Business Post and eJournal.ie, and for e Economist Intelligence Unit. He covered the

pandemic on a daily basis for e Irish Times and was part of a team nominated for a Newsbrands

Ireland award for coverage of nursing homes and COVID-19 in 2020. He was named Newsbrands

business journalist of the year in 2017. Pandemonium is his rst book. Any views or opinions

expressed in this piece are the personal views and opinions of the speaker.