Stormont challenged to ‘get on’ and fix gaps uncovered by UK Covid-19 Inquiry

The Stormont administration has been urged to “bloody well get on” and fix issues exposed by the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.

Brenda Campbell KC, acting for Bereaved Families for Justice NI, said the three weeks of hearings held in Belfast had been “very difficult” for those families.

First Minister Michelle O’Neill, who served as deputy first minister during the pandemic, former first minister Baroness Arlene Foster, Health Minister Robin Swann, chief medical officer Sir Michael McBride and senior civil servants are among those who gave evidence to the inquiry sitting in Belfast.

Ms O’Neill used her appearance to issue a fulsome apology for attending a large-scale funeral at the height of lockdown rules.

Expanding on previous apologies for hurt caused, she told the inquiry she should not have attended the funeral of senior republican Bobby Storey in west Belfast in June 2020.

The inquiry examined evidence around governance and decision-making in the Stormont administration, where ministers had taken up post in late January 2020 after three years of political collapse, just weeks before Covid-19 arrived in Northern Ireland.

The final witness to appear in Belfast was Sue Gray, a former civil servant who is now chief of staff for Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer.

She was the permanent secretary at Stormont’s Department of Finance at the outset of the pandemic, and conducted a probe to attempt to identify the source of leaks from key executive meetings but was not successful.

Ms Gray said people who want to leak will find a way to do it, but phones could be banned from confidential ministerial meetings to limit opportunities to leak, and establishing a culture where leaking is not tolerated was also important.

Asked what the reaction would be if something similar unfolded at a Cabinet meeting in London, she said: “I think that would be a terrible thing and it would be seen for that.”

Making her closing submissions on Thursday, Ms Campbell said the last three weeks had been “littered with oversights, omissions and failings”.

She referenced the impact of three years without devolved government, years of underfunding of the health service, the silo approach of departments, failure of the Executive Office to “step up and step in”, slow stepping up of civil contingency arrangements, failures of the test, trace and isolate policy and failure to protect the elderly and vulnerable.

Ms Campbell described “devastating evidence” exposing a “dysfunctional system”.

“From the outset decisive action, political maturity and good leadership were in remarkably short supply,” she said.

For Covid-19 bereaved families, she said every omission, oversight or failure “represents a missed opportunity that, had it not been made, might mean the person they loved and lost would still be here” or they could have comforted their loved ones in their last days, or “given them the send-off they deserved”.

Ms Campbell referred to the attendance of Ms O’Neill and Sinn Fein ministers at Bobby Storey’s funeral in June 2020 as “breathtakingly insensitive”, causing “hurt, anger and outrage” to the bereaved.

“While apologies have been fulsome in hindsight, it remains staggering that those who attended did not have the foresight to understand the hurt that they would cause to the public and to the executive, or if they did they attended regardless. It should not have happened and its consequences were grave,” she said.

Ms Campbell also condemned the “deliberate and orchestrated deployment of a cross-community vote” by the DUP at an executive meeting over Covid-19 restrictions in autumn 2020, quoting Justice Minister Naomi Long’s assessment of it as an “egregious abuse of power”.

“They had a very simple choice. They could have chosen to respect the rights of the majority of their colleagues to unite across departments, across communities, across political persuasions … but they couldn’t allow themselves to be outnumbered even in the face of public health measures that were strongly recommended and were to be proved all too necessary,” she said.

“It’s impossible to divorce that unedifying debacle in November 2020 from the chaos in the run-up to Christmas and from that shocking spike in deaths in early 2021.”

Ms Campbell said while the inquiry remains ongoing, Northern Ireland’s administrative and political leaders can learn and “start to put right the wrongs, the errors, the gaps and the oversights” now.

She concluded: “Many gaps have been exposed, promises to learn lessons have been made from the witness box. There is a great deal of work to be done by those who represent us.

“In the words of the late Mo Mowlam, the message from the Northern Ireland bereaved to those who represent us is now ‘bloody well get on and do it’.”