Owen Polley: The Covid inquiry has shown up Stormont incompetence but is ducking key issues

Sir Michael probably did not have this in mind when he referred to the ‘enemy within’. But the executive’s second biggest party at the time was Sinn Fein.

At the start of the pandemic, it virtue-signalled the hardest, then it became involved in perhaps the most flagrant breach of Covid regulations – the public funeral of IRA henchman, Bobby Storey, which brought thousands of people on to Belfast’s streets.

This was shameless hypocrisy of a kind that put the drab office parties at Number 10 into context. The then deputy first minister, Michelle O’Neill, who previously accused those who gathered in large groups of ‘killing people’, was photographed posing for selfies at the event with fellow mourners.

The failures of power-sharing, then, as well as the character of some of the politicians involved in it, were exposed starkly during Covid-19. At the same time, just like the national hearings, the evidence that was not included in this inquiry, and the questions it did not linger upon, were at least as revealing as the ground it covered.

It’s understandable and necessary that the process puts an emphasis on direct victims of the pandemic. Whether it was intentional or not, though, the inquiry appeared effectively to be prosecuting the case that government, locally and nationally, did ‘too little too late’ to protect the population from coronavirus.

In Northern Ireland, some of the most enlightening material involved interactions between elected politicians and civil servants. Previously, the Renewable Heating Incentive (RHI) inquiry suggested that officials often helped ministers to keep the workings of government here murky and unaccountable and that impression was not dispelled this time.

The NI civil service’s task, in working with the executive, is not enviable, but some senior figures seemed in the hearings to be covering their backs. The implication was that politics caused Stormont’s problems, even though officials were frequently at the centre of its dysfunction too.

For example, it was extraordinarily difficult for the inquiry to secure minutes of the first executive meeting following the Storey funeral, which civil servants at the Executive Office were supposed to provide. According to one of the hearings’ lawyers, multiple attempts were made to locate them, but officials initially suggested that they were missing, before belatedly submitting them in confused circumstances.

The head of the civil service in Northern Ireland, Jayne Brady, told the inquiry that she regretted that important information, including ministers’ WhatsApp messages, had been deleted. She acknowledged that similar failings were highlighted by the RHI inquiry, though she claimed that the ‘vulnerabilities of the system’ were now being addressed.

It is hardly surprising that the hearings exposed ineptitude, secrecy and hypocrisy in Northern Ireland’s government. It is unfortunate, though, that more attention was not paid to the unintended consequences of the measures that the executive eventually put in place. Sometimes, these restrictions were relaxed later than in the rest of the UK, because nationalist ministers were determined to follow the Irish republic’s rules.

The DUP’s Lord Weir, who was education minister at the time of lockdown, hinted at this problem in his evidence. At the start of the pandemic, in early March 2020, the Republic closed schools before Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Initially, nationalist parties in the executive seemed prepared to follow scientific advice, which at that time was to keep schools open. Within hours, though, Sinn Fein in particular was attacking its colleagues and Westminster, for decisions that were supposed to reflect collective responsibility.

In his evidence, the former head of the NI civil service, Sir David Sterling, seemed to imply that the DUP’s poor relationship with the Irish government contributed to those disagreements. Rather more convincingly, Lord Weir argued that nationalists were desperate to follow the example of Dublin rather than London. Even the zealously ‘progressive’ Alliance Party at the time favoured following Stormont’s own scientific advice, which was in line with Westminster’s.

What was lacking in this discussion was a rigorous examination of whether schools should have been shut at all, or a thorough investigation of the damage that closure inflicted on children’s education and mental and physical health.

Likewise, health officials attacked ministers for making economic arguments during the pandemic; by, for example. implementing the national Eat Out to Help Out scheme in NI. The delays or hesitations in the Covid response were consistently interrogated during this inquiry so far, but the case that restrictions were damaging, counter-productive or excessive has been less prominent.

There has been enough time, since the pandemic, to establish that lockdown and other measures came with considerable costs. In Northern Ireland, and across the UK, the inquiry offered a chance to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of the different strategies used both nationally and in the regions.

Too often, it seems instead to have become an exercise in settling scores and allocating blame. Or an opportunity for journalists to search threads from messaging apps for sensationalist content. No doubt this approach is in tune with the culture of blame that now pervades our society, but it seems increasingly unlikely to leave us better prepared, or more informed, for future pandemics.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​