Covid Inquiry: Bereaved families tell Stormont to 'bloody well get on' and fix issues exposed

The Stormont Assembly has been urged to “bloody well get on” and fix issues exposed by the UK Covid-19 Inquiry by bereaved families in Northern Ireland.

Brenda Campbell KC, acting for Bereaved Families for Justice NI, said the past three weeks of hearings in Belfast has been “very difficult” for those who lost loved ones in the pandemic.

Making her closing submissions on Thursday morning, the final day of the inquiry’s sittings in Belfast, Ms Campbell said the last few weeks have been “littered with oversights, omissions and feelings” and she described “devastating evidence” exposing a “dysfunctional system”.

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For the Covid-19 bereaved families, Ms Campbell said every omission, oversight or failure “represents a fork in the road” and a “missed opportunity that had it not been made, might mean the person they loved and lost would still be here”.

She referred to the attendance of former deputy first minister Michelle O’Neill and Sinn Fein ministers at a large-scale funeral for senior republican Bobby Storey despite lockdown restrictions in June 2020 as “breathtakingly insensitive”, causing “hurt, anger and outraged” to bereaved.

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

Ms Campbell said while the findings of the inquiry have not been delivered yet, administrative and political leaders can address issues 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'.”

Earlier Sue Gray, the ex-civil servant turned chief of staff for Sir Keir Starmer, gave evidence to the Covid-19 Inquiry on her time as a permanent secretary in Northern Ireland.

Ms Gray was the top civil servant in Stormont Department of Finance at the outset of the pandemic before she transferred to the Cabinet Office in London in May 2021.

She was asked to appear before the inquiry as the only senior ranking civil servant who had experience of working for both the devolved administration in Northern Ireland and the UK Government during the coronavirus emergency.

During her time in the Department of Finance she was asked to undertake a leak investigation amid official concerns at the volume of information from confidential Executive meetings that was being reported in the media.

The inquiry has heard how discussions at several high-pressure Executive meetings during the pandemic were effectively live-tweeted by journalists who were leaking the information in real time.

Ms Gray highlighted the differences between the Stormont Executive and the Cabinet when it came to leaking from meetings.

“I’m not going to say that everything is perfect there (at Cabinet in London) but, you know, people do respect the process and (at) Cabinet – often issues get resolved in Cabinet committees, not always at Cabinet – but you don’t read about (them), you occasionally read about differences of views, but there tends to be a certain discipline,” she said.

She noted that, unlike in Government, there were no defined rules around collective responsibility at Stormont.

Ms Gray acknowledged the mandatory coalition system in Northern Ireland was different, pointing out that when she was working at Stormont there were five parties in the administration, but said she believed a similar process could be made to work in NI.

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