We were cruel to ban people from mourning the dead during Covid, says emotional Edwin Poots – Belfast Telegraph

Former DUP minister gives deeply personal testimony to the Covid Inquiry, saying he believes Stormont was wrong to follow London so closely and should have locked down earlier but then relaxed certain restrictions

The Speaker of the Assembly, who was Agriculture Minister during the pandemic, spoke personally when he appeared before the Covid Inquiry in Belfast today.

He said that "if anything, lockdown should have happened more quickly", with Stormont waiting for Boris Johnson's government to act. However, he said Stormont didn't have the financial capability to lockdown without London's support.

Mr Poots said he believed Stormont had been wrong to follow London as closely as it did because "the evidence is there for everyone to see" that the Government was getting things wrong in areas such as putting vulnerable people out of hospitals into care homes without testing.

But he said that over time the restrictions became increasingly unjustifiable.

Mr Poots recalled his father, the former DUP councillor Charlie Poots, becoming unwell in April 2020 and calling an ambulance, which they followed to the Ulster Hospital but couldn't enter the hospital.

"I wasn't allowed to see him again until he was close to dying and that's the experience that thousands of families had. It was an awful experience, and that was imposed as a result of the Covid 19 regulations. Thousands of families across the province weren't able to be there with their loved ones whenever they needed them most.

Becoming emotional, Mr Poots said that the experience deeply impacted his view of the restrictions.

"I would have seen things like banning people from going to graveyards as being wholly ineffective in terms of saving lives but utterly cruel in how they affected the relatives of the deceased, particularly recently deceased.

"It's something that's important to many people, to be able to go to the grave of a loved one, but we, the Government, banned people from doing that. I didn't see any benefits whatsoever in terms of the fight against Covid to doing that."

When asked about his role in shaping the laws which banned people from visiting graveyards, Mr Poots said he was, along with everyone else, "entering the unknown" as Covid approached and so "I was supportive of the regulations that were being introduced because we needed to get a handle on how Covid-19 was going to affect the wider public...I was entirely supportive of the regulations as they were introduced at that time."

He said that at that time, with limited knowledge of how bad things would be, he thought it was right to restrict harshly, but that as time went on he thought the virus was not as serious as had first been feared and so fewer restrictions were necessary.

Mr Poots said the media were regularly receiving leaks before decisions were taken and "it was widely viewed that those leaks were coming not from the minister, but from within the Department of Health" because "no other department would have had that information".

He said that negative news, such as extending restrictions, was often left to Arlene Foster and Michelle O'Neill to announce, but Robin Swann would announce positive news.

Despite being anti-Agreement in 1998, Mr Poots also endorsed the mandatory coalition structures which shackle together the DUP and Sinn Fin in government.

He said: "The truth is that the structures we have are not the most ideal structures but they were the structures that were established after 25 years of bloodshed and they are the structures that are necessary to ensure that we have had a peaceful 27 or 28 years since then. [sic]"

For seven months, the DAERA scientific adviser wasn't receiving important updates because an incorrect email address was being used.

Mr Poots said he wasn't aware of that, but accepted it was a "deficiency".

Earlier, Alliance Justice Minister Naomi Long said the restrictions around death and burial were due to a concern that dead bodies could spread the virus.

Naomi Long giving evidence to the Covid Inquiry in Belfast today

She talked about large numbers of opened graves in graveyards, with diggers and other heavy machinery present in preparation for what they feared would be mass deaths.

Mrs Long also talked about her own bereavement early in the pandemic.

"Both my parents died in March, so it was at the start of the pandemic, and I wasn't able to attend their graves to remember, and that is difficult; that is difficult," she said.

"So I appreciate that it was a lot to ask, and with the benefit of hindsight, I don't know how much of a contribution it would have made to protecting people from covid, but we didn't have that benefit of hindsight."

She said "very often" she would learn of what the Executive was to discuss from journalists or news reports before she would even see her Executive papers.

She said neither the British or Irish Governments gave sufficient consideration to the effect of divergence between them on Northern Ireland.

Mrs Long described the DUP's use of its Executive veto to block further restrictions in autumn 2020 as an "egregious abuse" of a mechanism designed to protect the interests of unionist or nationalists.

By November 2020, she said people "had become very entrenched" in the Executive.

Mrs Long said that she had worked with the DUP's Diane Dodds to table a paper because "I knew if I tabled it, the DUP would dismiss it, but if their colleague tabled it, they might consider it and she did so".

She said that at the times when there was "strong leadership in the civil service", she and Nichola Mallon, both of whom were keener on consensus, "were excluded" from backroom discussions, making her sceptical about whether having a head of the Civil Service in late 2020 when a DUP-Sinn Fin disagreement on appointing a head of the civil service left civil servants leaderless would have improved things.

Read the original post:

We were cruel to ban people from mourning the dead during Covid, says emotional Edwin Poots - Belfast Telegraph