Transcript of Module 2 Public Hearing on 5 October 2023

(10.00 am)

Lady Hallett: Mr Keith.

Mr Keith: My Lady, may I call, please, Catriona Myles.

1. Mrs Catriona Myles

MRS CATRIONA MYLES (sworn).

Questions From Lead Counsel to the Inquiry

Lady Hallett: Please say if at any stage you need just to pause. I appreciate how difficult it is.

Mrs Catriona Myles: Thank you.

Mr Keith: Could you commence, please, by giving us your full name.

Mrs Catriona Myles: I’m Mrs Catriona Leanna Myles.

Lead Inquiry: Thank you very much, Mrs Myles. You have kindly provided the Inquiry already with a statement, INQ000282334. Is that a statement that you recall signing in fact on 25 September of this year?

Mrs Catriona Myles: It is.

Lead Inquiry: Thank you. In that statement, Mrs Myles, you describe how you are a member of Northern Ireland Covid Bereaved Families for Justice. Is that a branch of the UK-wide Covid Bereaved Families for Justice group?

Mrs Catriona Myles: It is.

Lead Inquiry: I’m going to ask you in a moment some more detail about the aims of the group, what it seeks to achieve, what it’s done, and what it hopes still to do. Before I do that, could you give us just a brief overview of what the general aims of the group are?

Does it, for example, focus its attention on providing support to the bereaved in Northern Ireland, campaigning for change where change is possible, and also holding decision-makers to account for decisions that the group believes contributed in any way towards the bereavements which your members have suffered?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Absolutely. Our group, obviously, we look at it from a Northern Ireland perspective. We are a little bit different, a little bit out there, but we are very much under the umbrella of the UK group, and we have a fantastic working relationship with them also.

Lead Inquiry: Does your group provide, firstly, bereavement support to its members?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Yeah, we – we’re a group who never thought we would ever come together. We have a shared loss. Unfortunately shared trauma. But we support each other. We source bereavement support for members. The leads of the group are fantastic guides. They’re there for us 24/7. In that respect, we’re very lucky.

Lead Inquiry: Is that bereavement support in terms of psychological, financial, emotional or all those areas?

Mrs Catriona Myles: The group will signpost, but as you – I’m sure you’re aware the services are extremely limited, and that is actually – one of the strands to our campaign is that we want more services in place for those that have had their lives destroyed by Covid.

Lead Inquiry: Is it the view of your members, to which your organisation provides a collective voice, that mistakes were made and that where it is possible to correct those mistakes, mainly to make sure that they never happen again, you’ve sought to campaign for change?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Absolutely. I mean, we are very well represented here by our legal team, but the group – it would be a travesty if what happened to us and our loved ones was allowed to happen again. So really, the main thing that we want from this Inquiry is accountability and reform.

Lead Inquiry: By accountability, do you mean an exploration of what went wrong? Is that what is meant by accountability?

Mrs Catriona Myles: I mean, obviously we have got a very negative experience of the pandemic –

Lead Inquiry: Of course.

Mrs Catriona Myles: – but we’re not saying everything went wrong, but we just want the truth – the truth to be out there, and to know that if and when something like this hits our shores again – not that Covid in itself has actually gone away, like some people think – that we will be better prepared, and that there will be nowhere for those in power to hide.

Lead Inquiry: Do you know whether your group has sought to take up the battle with the government, for example writing to it, pointing out areas where you believe mistakes were made, where things could be improved, and where, for the future, things could be done better? Is it a – has it been a campaign waged by correspondence and meetings or through the press? How has it worked?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Unlike your witnesses yesterday, I am a member of Northern Ireland Covid Bereaved, I’m not actually one of the founders, but our two leads have been involved with the government, liaising with the government from early, early days of the pandemic, actually before the inception of our group, to ensure that vulnerable people in care homes and hospitals have a voice. And really, I think that’s one of the reasons that they decided to form our group, because obviously our – we’re governed very differently in Northern Ireland, when we have a sitting government, and our leads have been chipping away at this since April of 2020, and they continue to do so.

Lead Inquiry: Is that when –

Mrs Catriona Myles: And hold down full-time careers.

Lead Inquiry: Forgive me. Is that when the group then commenced, around about April –

Mrs Catriona Myles: No. We had all kind of linked up on Facebook as and when our relatives died. The group really – and we also, most of us, had joined the UK group at its inception. As time went on, we realised that with the devolved situation that we kind of needed our own representation, because really unless you’re there on the ground in Northern Ireland you don’t really get how a lot of things work. So our group came about around the January of 2021.

Lead Inquiry: Thank you.

Now may I please ask you about your own father, because of course you suffered a bereavement as well. He was a teacher, was he not, and, we gather, a very talented popular musician?

Mrs Catriona Myles: He was.

Lead Inquiry: Prior to his death, in fact for some years before his death, did he suffer from a gallstone condition which then changed into something known as necrotising pancreatitis?

Mrs Catriona Myles: That’s right.

Lead Inquiry: Which is a very unpleasant and painful condition which will lead to the sufferer then developing severe diabetes?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Correct.

Lead Inquiry: At the beginning of the pandemic, with the restrictions that were then placed upon everybody, was it extremely hard for him to be able to manage the treatment that he was receiving, in terms of being able to see consultants and medics and so on, because of the practical difficulties associated with isolating himself before he could see any medic or consultant or so on?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Just very quickly before I go on to that, you have to remember that Northern Ireland’s healthcare system is in the worst state of all the UK healthcare systems, our waiting times are ridiculous, and this was prior to the pandemic. So by the time we locked down, Daddy I think had maybe a dozen to 15 attempts to get a face-to-face appointment with a GP. They all failed. He just was – had his medication titrated, his dosages titrated –

Lead Inquiry: Mrs Myles, I’m just go to ask you to slow down a wee bit, if you’d be so kind. It’s quite difficult for our stenographer to be able to keep up.

Mrs Catriona Myles: Okay, sorry. And maybe new prescriptions added into his regime. So we – you know, as a family, we very much feel that the scaling back of GP face-to-face appointments led Daddy down a path that potentially, if he had gotten to see his GP, it might not have ended up the way it ended up.

Lead Inquiry: In the event –

Lady Hallett: Sorry, just before you do, sorry to interrupt.

Mrs Myles, you said his medication – I’m sorry, I didn’t catch the word.

Mrs Catriona Myles: Titrated. So maybe the dosages changed, you know, or –

Lady Hallett: Oh, I see. Titrated is the word, thank you.

Mrs Catriona Myles: Yes, yes.

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

Mr Keith: Perhaps due to the difficulty in getting medical attention, being able to get the appointments, to get the consultations, did there come a time when he was given a diagnosis of secondary liver cancer, effectively –

Mrs Catriona Myles: Yes.

Lead Inquiry: – which turned out, in fact, to be a wrongful diagnosis, he was then diagnosed with, in effect, primary liver cancer?

Mrs Catriona Myles: That’s right. By the September of 2020, Dad had been rushed into Antrim Area Hospital. There they found a lesion on his liver. It took a few weeks to get a diagnosis because there was issues this in that every time Daddy needed to attend a hospital appointment, he had to isolate for two weeks, get a Covid test at an acute hospital setting, wait for the results, wait for the appointment, attend the appointment, whereby he had broken his isolation, and then go home and wait another two weeks to get – to be able to go back to get the results of said appointment.

So when Daddy was told that he had a rare, aggressive liver cancer, we didn’t have many two weeks to play with.

Lead Inquiry: And of course all the time the cancer was growing all the more aggressively?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Absolutely. And the – sorry, the really sad thing is at the outset we were told Daddy could be cured, but unfortunately, by the time he met his oncologist, and weeks and weeks had lapsed due to policy and protocol and procedure within the hospital system in Northern Ireland, Daddy was then deemed terminal.

Lead Inquiry: Was that on 27 November of 2020?

Mrs Catriona Myles: That’s right.

Lead Inquiry: Because he was by then, and he had been told for the first time on that day, terminally ill, and because his condition was extremely poorly, did he have to go – in fact was he dropped off at A&E very shortly thereafter?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Yes, the next morning we got a call to say that his bloods were through the roof and that he was – his liver was beginning to fail and we needed to get him to the nearest A&E department immediately.

Lead Inquiry: What hospital was he made an in-patient in?

Mrs Catriona Myles: So my brother dropped him off at Antrim Area A&E department, and my brother tells me that he remembers Daddy waving back at him with his little bag like a scared schoolboy.

Lead Inquiry: Did he leave the hospital again?

Mrs Catriona Myles: In a box.

Lead Inquiry: Do you know whether he moved wards when he was in hospital?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Daddy was moved three times, and whenever I – after Daddy had passed, I got his hospital notes, and in his records it clearly states in the nursing notes “Gerry has been moved wards due to possible exposure”.

Lead Inquiry: From Covid?

Mrs Catriona Myles: That’s right.

Lead Inquiry: Do you know whether or not he was tested for Covid?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Daddy was in a ward with symptomatic patients, I’m not sure which of the wards and at what time, but on day nine he tested positive for Covid.

Lead Inquiry: He was given what is called end of life care?

Mrs Catriona Myles: That’s correct.

Lead Inquiry: And your brother was the only member of your family who was permitted to see him, to the extent that he was, and I’ll come on to that in a moment. Did you see him when he was in hospital?

Mrs Catriona Myles: No, I didn’t see my father from the day that he was told he was terminally ill, 27 November, and my brother – we were given the option that one family member could come and say goodbye through a tiny slit of glass in a six-bay ward, where my father was three beds down, and the person would be wearing full hazmat protection. So by my reckoning that meant that this area here (indicated) through a window quite far away. And again, my brother is traumatised by the fact that he was – he’d only arrived and he had sort of said – he made up a story that he was bringing daddy some music to listen to on an MP3 player rather than scare Daddy by saying, you know, “We’re here to say goodbye”, so he was making sign language at my father and the nurse came to the door, and said, “Right, that’s it, the man in the next bay needs to use the commode”. So the door was closed, and the nurse explained to my dad, and the curtain was pulled round for the man beside for to use the toilet, and my daddy saluted my brother, and that was the last anybody saw him.

Lead Inquiry: None of you were present, therefore, at the time of his death. Do you know even the time of his death?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Daddy had none of his family with him, Daddy had nobody with him. We don’t know what time my father expired, he was found dead on 23 December, we suggest between 7 and 8 pm.

Lead Inquiry: Was there a funeral?

Mrs Catriona Myles: We were lucky, in the second wave, if you can call it lucky. We were allowed to invite 30 people to our church. But Daddy died on 23 December, and I still have – had a young family at the time, and on 23 December we were preparing for Santa Claus arriving. I remember waking up on the 24th, and bringing the turkey out of my fridge and thinking about my father lying alone in a fridge in a dirty hospital gown on his own on Christmas Eve.

Christmas Day went by in a blur, all our family separated. The funeral plans had to happen over the phone, with three separate households not even able to come together to plan the small funeral.

I checked out. I just felt that if it wasn’t going to be a funeral worthy of my father’s life, I didn’t really want any part in it. We went to visit him in the chapel of rest, and in Northern Ireland wakes are – wakes happen before funerals in Northern Ireland, and they’re a massive part of our culture, and they’re a massive part of a grieving ritual. That didn’t happen. And when I visited Daddy in the chapel of rest, whereby I felt he should never have had to have been – he should have been in his own home, although deceased – I just remember looking at that coffin and thinking to myself: that could be a bag of potatoes in that coffin, how do I know what’s in that coffin?

It was one of the most detached, surreal experiences of my life, and that was on Boxing Day. So Christmas Day was the weirdest experience. I can barely explain it.

Lead Inquiry: From your own terrible experience and the experiences of the members of the group of which you’re a member, have you raised – has your group raised – a number of concerns, expressed across large numbers of people, relating to the deaths of their loved ones which form the basis of the campaign which your group has pursued?

Mrs Catriona Myles: There are wide-ranging concerns, and there are themes and strands to lots of those concerns.

Lead Inquiry: Picking up some of those themes, Mrs Myles, in your statement you turn firstly to the high level issue of the differences in decision-making between Northern Ireland and Westminster. Has it appeared to many of your members that there’s a lack of clarity or understanding as to the extent to which Northern Ireland made decisions for itself and for its own people, as opposed to Westminster being the driver behind the imposition of society-wide restrictions and decisions on Northern Ireland society? Has that been a big area of concern?

Mrs Catriona Myles: That has been a theme. And I’m very conscious that when I finish today you’re going to hear from people with lots of letters to their names and things, experts in their field, but our group and the people I represent, we’re the experts on what happens when it all goes very wrong, and one of the opinions in our group is that Stormont basically did what Westminster told them to do.

Lead Inquiry: None of us are necessarily privy to government decisions behind the scenes, how they’re made, at least until there’s an Inquiry of this sort. From your perspective, and the perspective of your members, was there a degree of clarity? Were you, do you feel, properly informed as to the developments which flowed from the decisions that were being made? Were you kept, in essence, in the loop, do you feel?

Mrs Catriona Myles: There certainly wasn’t clarity. If anything, the opposite. Very often you would watch the reports in the evening and the updates, and it wasn’t clear whether we were following what Westminster were saying or waiting to hear what the devolved government would tell us to do. There needed to be more cohesion and more communication, in our eyes, with the two governments, and it seemed, particularly in hindsight, that Northern Ireland didn’t really have a seat at the table with the big boys, they were just told: this is how much money you’re getting, this is what you should do. You know, and that’s what happened.

And generally there was a two-week lag, we found, with Northern Ireland, so that if a new rule came in here, we were sort of made to feel that our guys were going to go away and think about it, but in reality two weeks later they just stood up and told us to do what had been said here two weeks prior.

Lead Inquiry: So has concern also been expressed about the timings of the decisions that were made? So, for example, the timings of decisions in relation to travel restrictions or social restrictions or society-wide interventions such as the lockdowns?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Absolutely. One standout is the fact that, of course, there’s no denying – doesn’t matter what political persuasion you are, we share an island with the Republic of Ireland and the rules and legislation set out in Westminster didn’t really allow for the fact that we had a land border that – whereby meant that in some cases, on, for example, the Derry and Donegal border, you could have a house on one side of a fence having to abide by one set of rules and legislations and yet the neighbours on the other side of that fence had a completely different set of rules. And then because of that you had people that were moving about through the two different regions for work purposes, social purposes, et cetera. It got so confusing at times for people, it was very hard for normal people to work out if they were abiding by the rules, which rules they were abiding by.

And another thing I think is relevant is that we found in hindsight that Northern Ireland actually seemed to be two weeks behind in the curve at most times from the mainland, and I wonder – this is personal – if we had enacted what was said here at the beginning of the two weeks, rather than having the lag, would our curve have been slightly dampened?

Lead Inquiry: And would more people have survived?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Absolutely.

Lead Inquiry: Looking at the healthcare structures generally, and of course hospitals – and your father of course died in the Antrim Hospital – is – I mean, it’s obvious, nosocomial infection is a huge issue for many of your members, the catching of Covid in hospital.

But do the concerns of your members go wider than that? Have some of them expressed concern about whether or not, due to age or vulnerability, their loved ones were given up on, or, because of the demands being placed on the system, they simply didn’t receive the levels of medical care that they were absolutely entitled to receive?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Absolutely. Within my statement, we had a case whereby a lady felt her mother was being telephone triaged with some sort of form, and because of her age was deemed not worthy of any life-saving treatment.

I remember reading an article by Sandy Toksvig, and in it she said there shouldn’t be a hierarchy for life, and it seemed very much like, nearly a fatalistic approach, that if you had underlying issues, if you’re an ethnic minority, if you were aged, whatever that is, in society – you know, at what age do you become aged, I don’t know – that those lives were more expendable and weren’t worthy of the same interventions.

Lead Inquiry: Is palliative or end of life care also another issue, another area about which a great deal of concern has been expressed?

Mrs Catriona Myles: It’s an issue that’s extremely triggering for our families. Lots of families, including my own, feel that the end of life pathway, even the structure that they were using, the Liverpool Pathway, years ago was deemed inappropriate, and that the medications used really hastened death in lots of cases.

Lead Inquiry: Did many of your members lose loved ones in the care sector?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Absolutely. We have massive concerns with – that we now know that the care sector was flooded with non-tested residents at the beginning of the Covid outbreak. But we also had a situation whereby maybe someone was being transferred from a care home to a hospital, the families weren’t maybe being told that that person was symptomatic of Covid, that person unfortunately maybe passed away in hospital, but the care home were never informed by the hospital that that person had Covid, therefore the other residents had been exposed.

And another issue is the isolation for residents in care homes. You know, it must have just been like prison to those poor people at that time, you know, being basically locked in tiny square boxes for many hours of the day, you know, and having zero autonomy.

Lead Inquiry: You’ve described your own father’s funeral. Are the restrictions that were placed on funerals and wakes and social rituals associated with the passing, is that also another area about which a great deal of concern has been expressed?

Mrs Catriona Myles: Yes, and in Northern Ireland particularly it’s of such importance to us within our culture. I mean, from my perspective, we were actually one of the – being wave 2 – one of the luckier families, in that we did get to have a small – pathetic – funeral, but at the very start – and some people might say, well, the government didn’t know what was coming down the track. I don’t think that’s true. I think they just didn’t act quick enough. But some people – I have a cousin who got a phone call to say, “Your daddy will be buried at such and such a time if you would like to say a prayer in your home”, and four men in hazmat suits just placed that coffin in the ground at a certain time on a certain day, with masses of open graves around. That was in 2020. And then the step up from that was the six-person funeral. And I can only imagine, if you have an immediate family of more than six people, how could you ever choose which six people went to your loved one’s funeral?

Lead Inquiry: Finally, Mrs Myles, your statement identifies another big area of concern, which is the damage done to public trust in government by virtue of the revelations of the behaviour in Downing Street and elsewhere during particularly the middle and later parts of the pandemic.

Why is that an issue of such great concern to your members? I don’t want you to answer by virtue, please, of the merits or demerits of partying, but in terms of the damage that was done to society’s belief and trust in government.

Mrs Catriona Myles: Yeah. Yes. This is an area I’ve been very vocal about, and I’m not here – I’m not an expert, I haven’t got all the details, but one thing I will say is that some people think, you know, “Christmas parties, it was Christmas”, we have a family that when their parent was dying, alone, and it was May of 2020, we now know, and it’s in the public realm, that one of these parties was going on. And it’s just disgusting. It’s galling that the same people that were making these draconian rules thought, “Rules for some”, but were above the rules and, “Sure, what they don’t know will never hurt them”. But the thing about the modern day is the truth will always come out. And for us, we get very angry about it, and we don’t – you know, public that haven’t been touched by this, I get it, if it doesn’t visit your door, you don’t really get it, but we’re still living through this.

And so many people have so many opinions. We have the Covid deniers, the arguments about vaccinations, we have all that, and we still have to try to live our lives, process our grief, and hold our loved ones’ memory in our heart against the backdrop of all the politics that are going around, you know, surrounding Covid. So when there are likes of these parties going on, it just adds insult to injury for the bereaved families.

Mr Keith: Mrs Myles, thank you very much.

The Witness: Could I very, very briefly, because I know you’re under pressure. I just wanted to say what a privilege it is that my father’s story was heard today, but I am a corporate witness for every family in Northern Ireland, and I hope that today you will remember every mother, father, brother, sister, husband, wife, that are feeling how I feel or have suffered and lost, and the – ultimately I am telling my father’s story because he’s not here to tell it, and we want to know why our loved ones aren’t here.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Mrs Myles.

I’m in no way surprised that you and your family are so traumatised, having described the circumstances of your father’s death, and I’m truly sorry, and I will remember all the people you’ve described. As you know, I’ve met some of them and I hope to meet some more during the course of this Inquiry, but I will remember them, I promise.

How old were your children when your father died?

The Witness: My son was almost 8 and then I had one in her teens and one of 19 at that time.

Lady Hallett: It must have been particularly difficult with them.

The Witness: Yeah. And, sorry, my youngest son has autism, which played a factor, and I had meant to mention that as one of the vulnerabilities as well. You know, special needs people were really impacted terribly.

Lady Hallett: Yes. Well, thank you very much indeed, you have been extremely brave.

The Witness: Thank you, my Lady.

(The witness withdrew)

Lady Hallett: Right, I think the idea is that we have a quick break.

Mr Keith: Please.

Lady Hallett: Five minutes, please.

(10.34 am)

(A short break)

(10.40 am)

Mr Keith: Professor Nazroo, please.