Transcript of Module 2C Public Hearing on 30 April 2024.

(10.00 am)

1. Opening Remarks by the Chair

Lady Hallett: Good morning, everyone, some present here in Belfast and to those of you following us online.

From the beginning of this Inquiry, I hope I’ve made clear that this is an Inquiry for all four nations of the United Kingdom, which is why we’ve held hearings, not only in London but in Edinburgh, Cardiff and now here in Belfast.

Today we begin the public hearings for Module 2C, focusing on key political decision-making in response to the pandemic in Northern Ireland.

I am very conscious of the fact that there are many other issues for which people have concerns, for example mental health, health, care homes and the like, on which we are not focusing in this module. But, as I said to the members of bereaved families whom I met last night, those issues will be covered in later modules.

I also explained to them why we cannot call more people who suffered loss during the hearings. We just do not have the time. We have to press on, and I have to publish any recommendations before memories fade and people forget the appalling suffering caused by the pandemic.

We will need the support of the public and the media to ensure any recommendations I make are implemented.

To help remind us all of why the Inquiry matters, we start each module with an impact film. Like its predecessors, the impact film for this module is extremely moving, and there will be those who find it too distressing to watch. It lasts 20 minutes. I will pause in a moment to allow those who are in the hearing room who wish to do so to leave for a few minutes, and those who are following online who may wish to press mute or pause the streaming.

After the film has been played, Ms Clair Dobbin King’s Counsel, Lead Counsel to the Inquiry for this module, will begin her opening submissions. She will explain in some detail what we shall be examining in this module and what the issues are that need resolution.

So would those who would like to leaving the hearing room or press pause, please do so now.

(Pause)

Lady Hallett: Thank you.

(Video played)

Lady Hallett: I don’t think anybody did go, so we can start again.

Ms Dobbin. Opening statement by LEAD COUNSEL TO THE INQUIRY for

MODULE 2C

Ms Dobbin: Thank you.

My Lady, I was going to start, if I may, by introducing those who appear before you. I know that some of them are familiar, some of them may be less so.

The Northern Ireland Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice are represented by Mr McGarrity, Mr Wilcock King’s Counsel and Ms Campbell King’s Counsel.

Disability Action Northern Ireland are represented by Mr Dutta, by Mr Friedman King’s Counsel and by Mr Stern.

The Trades Union Congress are represented by Mr Stilliard, Mr Jacobs and Ms Peacock.

The Commissioner for Older People is represented by Ms Miller, and also by Ms Monye Anyadike-Dane and Ms Herdman.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council is represented by Ms Winfield, Mr Phillips King’s Counsel and Ms McKenna.

The Northern Ireland Department of Health is represented by Ms Erwin, by Ms Murnaghan King’s Counsel, by Ms Fee King’s Counsel, by Mr Kennedy and Ms Jones.

The Executive Office of Northern Ireland is represented by Mr O’Loan, by Mr Coll King’s Counsel and by Ms Fee.

The Northern Ireland Department of Finance is represented by Ms McGivern and by Mr Hanna King’s Counsel.

Baroness Foster is represented by Mr McBurney, and by Ms Ellison.

Mr Paul Givan is represented by Mr McBurney too, and also by Ms Ellison.

Ms Michelle O’Neill is represented by Mr Ó Muirugh and Ms Quinlivan King’s Counsel and Mr Bassett.

Before I begin this opening, may I please thank the Module 2C legal team and also the paralegal team as well. I think I’ve said this before, my Lady, but they have borne a particular burden in Module 2C in coping with the disclosure and in particular with late disclosure over the past few weeks. They’ve been absolutely essential to getting to this point, and, in terms of getting to this point today and appearing here before you, as ever it’s been a collective effort. The evidence gathered, the questions that will be put, they all represent the combined efforts of all of the teams who appear before you. And again, may I thank them on behalf of the Inquiry for the enormous work and care which has gone into the preparation of evidence, the evidence proposals and the questions which have been proposed for witnesses as well.

I’m very conscious too that behind all of the counsel and solicitors who sit before you there will be many more other people, paralegals and young lawyers, behind the scenes, and on behalf of the Inquiry, of course, I’d like to thank them too for all of their work.

Loss and grief are the defining experiences that unite all of humanity and from which none can escape. So too it is here the grief felt for those who died, for the circumstances in which they died, or for the loss of precious time with them, that’s borne by all people across Northern Ireland. The film that we’ve just seen serves to remind us all of the legacy which Covid-19 has left, and the more you watch the film I think the clearer it becomes that the circumstances in which people died has had the most profound effect on those who have been left behind.

But what of course it speaks to is life lost on a huge scale, of lives altered, of people changed by what they lived through or what they worked through, of consequences which are simply not capable of quantification, and of course it’s a sober reminder of why we are all here before you today and why it matters so much.

The opening of Module 2C marks the final chapter of Module 2. Module 2 has taken you and the Inquiry outside London, as you’ve noted, to Wales and Scotland, and it ends here in Northern Ireland. It might be thought fitting that it does, because Northern Ireland is so distinct from the rest of the United Kingdom, it’s geographically disconnected, it shares its land border with the Republic of Ireland and therefore the European Union. Its population, as Sir David Sterling, the former head of the civil service to Northern Ireland, notes in his witness statement, at around 1.9 million people is smaller than that of the population of Greater Manchester.

But of course the most profound difference from the rest of the United Kingdom lies in Northern Ireland’s history, in its history of violence, in blood spilt, the suffering of ordinary people, and the collective trauma that decades of terror and killing brought, and it lies in the decision made by its people 26 years ago to accept the Good Friday Agreement, and by so doing to indicate their desire to leave peacefully and with shared structures upon which they would all be governed.

Now, my Lady, I know that that might seem like an obvious point, but in an Inquiry which has deliberately and consciously gone to different parts of the United Kingdom to consider their decision-making, it’s nonetheless such an important part of the background to Northern Ireland and to the structures which you will in due course consider.

In responding to Covid-19, Northern Ireland ministers had to negotiate relationships with both Westminster and the Republic of Ireland. The sharing of a permeable border with the Republic of Ireland meant that in terms of epidemiology Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland were a single epidemiological unit. But constitutionally and legally they were not. They were accountable to their respective Parliament and Assembly, and to their respective electorates. The United Kingdom Government, not the Northern Ireland Government, was competent to deal with accepted matters, including the United Kingdom’s border. That appears to have caused difficulties in both directions, north and south.

But if the pandemic did anything, it was to expose the frailty of all of the human race, to show that existential threats don’t exist at some point in a distant, far-off future, they can fast become a reality to which all must adapt, and it’s a reality that we may well have to confront again, hence again of course the reason for this Inquiry, my Lady.

The work of the Inquiry thus far has shown that the ability to adapt and to survive in the face of the threat of Covid-19 was not universal. The burden did not fall equally on people. In Northern Ireland, like the rest of the United Kingdom, Covid-19 discriminated in that it made seriously ill and killed the vulnerable, the disabled and older people in greater numbers.

Turning to the political, if I may for a moment, it’s just hard to escape this in Northern Ireland, but, my Lady, as you’ve observed many times in this Inquiry, the lens through which it looks is that of epidemiology and common humanity. Its work includes whether judgements were made on grounds in terms of what would have the best outcome in terms of risk to life, of course noting that that calculus is not necessarily a straightforward one, or whether decisions were made or positions taken for the right reasons in the public interest, not in the political interest.

In Northern Ireland, the question of whether political considerations informed the positions adopted by politicians or coloured their approach to decision-making is just unavoidable, but it’s not a carte blanche for a blame game either.

It’s an invitation to the politicians who will appear before you and those who advised them to reflect upon the role that they played in the extraordinary circumstances that met them upon the resumption of power-sharing in 2020.

It’s an opportunity for candour and the demonstration of the highest ideals that politicians share to make things better for the future. The scale of loss of life and the individual human experience which sits behind that speaks to the need for such reflection in Northern Ireland. The latest statistics show that there were an estimated 4,075 excess deaths from 1 March 2020 to the end of the year 2022. In the same period, there were 5,060 Covid-related deaths, a bleak tally of life lost during the pandemic.

But how does that compare to the rest of the United Kingdom? In his report to the Inquiry, Professor Hale stated that relative to the spread of the virus measures came into force in England slower than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, largely because the viral spread began first in England. He noted, and again the emphasis is important, relative to the spread of the virus, the devolved administrations implemented stricter policies on school and workplace closures as well as restrictions on public events before Westminster, although these measures were adopted on more or less the same day across the four nations.

Overall, relative to the spread of the virus, Northern Ireland therefore saw measures adopted relatively early in the spread of the disease, whilst England had already reached a significant prevalence before measures came into force.

Overall, Professor Hale concluded that in the three-year period from 2020 to 2022 England experienced the 19th highest number of Covid deaths per capita on a global scale, placing it at the 15th position amongst European nations. Northern Ireland fared relatively better to England in terms of the pandemic’s impact, holding the 52nd position worldwide and ranking 34th in Europe. Scotland was at 38th globally and 27th amongst the European countries. Wales was at the 30th global rank, and 21st in Europe.

Professor Hale also concluded that England and Northern Ireland tended to have less stringent policies than Scotland and Wales during the second half of 2020. For the latter part of 2021, Northern Ireland had the most stringent measures, whereas England had the least stringent measures.

According to Professor Hale, overall a comparison of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland did not demonstrate major differences between the two jurisdictions during the initial months of the pandemic, save that he noted that Northern Ireland was particularly slow to impose restrictions on public transportation, whilst in relation to the Republic of Ireland it was particularly slow to adopt international travel restrictions by comparison to other countries.

My Lady, on that, may I then turn to the Inquiry’s consideration of the statistics.

According to NISRA, which is the Northern Ireland statistical agency, excess deaths in Northern Ireland were highest in April to May 2020 and October 2020 to January 2021, July 2021 to November 2021, July 2022 and December 2022.

I was going to ask if we may just look at some slides to put that in a visual format and those are at INQ000472397.

I think that this is slide 1. If we could go to slide 2.

My Lady, this chart shows the number of deaths by date of death where Covid was mentioned on the death certificate. So the lighter blue bars that you see represent the daily deaths, and the dark blue line shows the seven-day average. I think this point is really important as we go forward, but obviously you will note the two peaks.

So what the chart shows is that the highest peak in Covid deaths was actually during the second wave. So at the peak of the second wave in January 2021, there were 35 deaths in a single day, whereas the number of deaths per day in the first wave peaked at 25, and again you’ll notice – and this is important for the evidence that we’ll hear – you’ll see the duration of that wave in the latter part of 2020 and into January 2021 and into early spring, and that’s likely to be quite an important focus for Module 2C and why it was that the peak looks like that in the second, as it were, wave of the pandemic.

If we could go to slide 3, please, this is the slide which shows you Covid deaths and excess deaths together.

My Lady, I know that you’re familiar with the concept of excess deaths, but perhaps for those who aren’t, they’re calculated by comparing deaths from all causes, and that includes non-Covid ones, for a given period, and you compare it to the average for the same period in 2015 to 2019. So, for example, comparing March 2020 to the average for March across 2015 to 2019.

Again, what you can see from this chart is the general link between periods of high numbers of Covid deaths and periods of high excess deaths. So you can see, if you look at spring 2020, that the wave of deaths there, Covid deaths, resulted in an almost identical spike in excess deaths as well.

But what you can also see then, if you trace the lines across, is the link between Covid deaths and excess deaths weakens in Northern Ireland. So although the second wave of Covid was associated with a period of significant excess deaths, there were substantially fewer excess deaths than Covid deaths.

We’ll obviously explore this with the Chief Scientific Adviser to Northern Ireland, it may mean that those who died of Covid at this point may have been vulnerable to dying from other causes. It may also be explained by a reduction in death from other causes as well, due to behavioural changes.

So, my Lady, in other words, sadly it may mean that in the second wave those who were vulnerable to becoming ill and dying died in that wave, but again as I’ve said we’ll ask the Chief Scientific Adviser a bit more about that.

If we could go to the next slide, please, this is the United Kingdom comparisons, and again this seems to illustrate that point that in the first wave Northern Ireland experienced much lower levels of mortality than other UK nations, but that again when it came to the second wave Northern Ireland had more similar levels of mortality to the rest of the UK. It was still lower than England and Wales, but higher than Scotland.

Then if we may go to slide 5, please, these are the age-standardised mortality rates. Again, my Lady, I know that’s a concept that you’re familiar with, but because the risks of Covid differ substantially by age and Northern Ireland has the youngest population of the four nations, controlling for differences in the age profile of the different nations arguably leads to fairer comparisons.

So you can see this chart is based on ONS data that’s controlled for those differences in ages. It shows deaths added up cumulatively over the course of the pandemic and compares this to the cumulative total to the level that would be expected over the same duration of time historically. Again, this suggests that for the whole of the period of interest to the Inquiry, the cumulative excess mortality was lower than the rest of the United Kingdom, but again the difference was most pronounced at the peak of the first wave and the gap reduced thereafter, although overall the cumulative mortality continued to remain lower than the rest of the United Kingdom. But again I think it makes that important point about focusing as well on what happened during that second wave.

Thank you. I think that can be taken down.

May I touch then briefly on borders and data as well. My Lady, as you know, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland comprise of a Common Travel Area. That means that British and Irish citizens can move freely and reside in either jurisdiction. Dr McClean of the Public Health Agency in Northern Ireland explains in her statement that statistical analysis of Covid’s genomic sequences indicate that a majority of the introductions of Covid-19 in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland until the end of May 2020 were lineages of viruses that were in circulation in England, and according to her the same was true for all later lineages as well. So she states that that indicates the importance of the Covid-19 situation in England for Northern Ireland.

In addition to that, the fact that the Republic of Ireland had its own airports, its own policies in relation to international travel, and again the fact of the permeable border between it and Northern Ireland, posed difficulties for Northern Ireland in terms of its ability to control who entered.

My Lady, as you’ll see from the evidence, that was a point of difficulty between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland which took a considerable period of time to resolve.

But if we put the constitutional difficulties to one side, there are obvious issues as to whether was scope for greater co-operation with the Republic of Ireland or whether in the crucible of a pandemic advancing potentially politically sensitive co-operation is realistic.

To give but one obvious example, data on Covid deaths was gathered in a sufficiently different way in the Republic of Ireland to make accurate contemporaneous comparison difficult. It’s unclear to us exactly how this impacted on modelling and, again, it’s a question about which witnesses will be asked, but in a context where two parts of an island form an epidemiological whole, it would appear an obvious disadvantage to both not to have readily comparable data, and it just doesn’t seem to have been possible to create this capacity whilst the pandemic was ongoing.

In answer to what must be an obvious question, how did Northern Ireland compare to the Republic of Ireland, the Inquiry understands that that is not easily answered because data comparison with the Republic of Ireland remains caveated.

We understand that international organisations have more limited data for the Republic of Ireland, and in part that may reflect inconsistencies in recording and publication methodologies, and it may also reflect issues with the timeliness of death certificates in the Republic of Ireland as well, and that was something that was noted by Eurostat, one of the European statistical agencies, when issuing an explanatory note for one of its datasets in which it stated:

“Data from Ireland were not included in the first phase of the weekly deaths data collection: official timely data were not available because deaths can be registered up to three months after the date of death.”

On 19 March 2021, the Office for National Statistics was reporting that:

“Notably the Republic of Ireland has not submitted any data to the Eurostat mortality database, so we are unable to report any measure of excess mortality for this country.”

So, again, that just goes back to the point, it remains very difficult. I think a question for this Inquiry would be: why is there not more interest in being able to have that basis for comparison between the two countries?

Can I just go back, then, to what the statistics appear to say, because they do appear to tell two different stories.

The first is that Covid deaths were comparatively – and again I emphasise comparatively – lower than the rest of the UK in the first wave, because it appears Northern Ireland went into lockdown at an earlier stage of the development of the pandemic as compared to other parts of the UK. So again, although it went into lockdown on the same day as everywhere else, Covid-19 was just not as prevalent in Northern Ireland at that point.

Now, of course, there may be other considerations at play here, like the population density of Northern Ireland, which may also have affected that, and again that may be an issue for the CSA, but nonetheless that appears to be the position.

But the question remains whether or not Northern Ireland could have done more or introduced more severe restrictions at an earlier point. After all, the Republic of Ireland introduced a set of restrictions on 12 March 2020, including the closures of schools, so schools therefore closed there on 13 March 2020, the decision to close schools in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland was introduced on 18 March, and in Northern Ireland all schools closed to pupils on 23 March 2020.

So, again, we come back to that point, in what was a single epidemiological unit in terms of how the virus was behaving, but in two separate states there was a potentially time critical period where they went in separate directions on the closure of schools, and you might want to hear from the Chief Medical Officer to Northern Ireland, Professor Sir Michael McBride, about the reasons for not closing schools in Northern Ireland at that point and any impact that divergence might have had.

But, my Lady, may I make this point, and it’s an important one: the lower rate of deaths in wave 1 by comparison to other parts of the United Kingdom ought not to be a source of complacency, again, just because they were lower than those in the rest of the UK, and that’s particularly having regard to what happened as the pandemic progressed in Northern Ireland. Certainly we’ve noted that on 11 October the Northern Ireland Chief Medical Officer is noted to have said that if Northern Ireland was a country its rates would have been the worst in Europe. And as he set out in his statement, by 20 January 2021 the number of people in hospital in Northern Ireland reached the highest levels at any time during the pandemic.

Again, just coming back to that point, the fact that the total numbers of both Covid deaths and excess deaths were higher in wave 2 is obviously something of considerable concern in Northern Ireland and about which witnesses will be asked.

My Lady, those are the statistics. What about the people they represent, how they lived and how they died? The film gives us a window into something of what that means, and you’ll hear evidence shortly from Ms Reynolds about the circumstances in which she lost her Aunt Marie, and in those two people, Marion and Marie, we are reminded of the dignity of life lived and the love had for those who died.

In Northern Ireland, like other parts of the United Kingdom, for many people the loss of someone that they loved or cared for was compounded by the circumstances in which they became ill, or, as the film has shown, the circumstances in which people were before they died. Besides that, we know that there were people who were confused and frightened in those circumstances. We know that there were family and friends who were desperately worried about whether or not their loved ones were being looked after properly.

Ms Reynolds speaks in her statement to the experiences of Bridget Halligan and Nuala Scullion in that regard, and their experiences echo those that we heard about in the film. Ms Scullion was taken away in an ambulance and died five weeks later, but her family didn’t get to speak to her again, although they were permitted to see her by Zoom before she died, but she’d already lost consciousness. Again, like the experiences of Sharon and Lizzie, who you heard from in the film, the sheer awfulness of having to see your loved one through a phone or through an iPad before they died.

And again it comes back to that point, it’s those circumstances which appear to have so profoundly affected people.

And we know that Covid deprived many people of the love, care and support that they would have had before they died, regardless of its cause, and of course we know that it deprived older people, and particularly those who were living in care homes and people who were ill, of really precious contact.

Again, that’s a loss that can’t be measured by reference to the number of people who died. There are so many other consequences and losses for people, important and unquantifiable.

We know that the position of people who lived in care homes during Covid-19 is a matter of acute concern to core participants in Module 2C. Their concerns focus on the standards of care that they were afforded, to the lack of external scrutiny, their inability to see them, and the lack of clarity about what was permitted in this regard. And we know that the number of excess deaths peaked in Northern Ireland in care homes in April 2020 as well.

We are, of course, cognisant that the focus of Module 2C is on government decision-making, but we will also look at the extent to which the Executive Committee was apprised of the situation or enquired about care homes as well, or were involved in the decisions which touched upon them.

At these times, often the only comfort that people had was each other, but we know that the ability to grieve together was very circumscribed for many people, and again it was a feature of the film as well. The accounts of people grieving in isolation during the pandemic are extremely hard to bear.

In Northern Ireland, where many people have a faith or cleave to important traditions around death, the restrictions were another source of deep pain, and I think what the film points to was the sense of loved ones not being able to give their family members the remembrance or the funeral that they deserved.

What you also heard was that sense of families feeling that their loved ones had been disrespected because of the way in which their bodies were handled as well, and that’s something that we will also touch on.

Just going back to the impact of the lockdowns, my Lady, I know that through the work thus far the Inquiry is well aware that there are people for whom lockdowns and other restrictions exposed them to violence, to cruelty, addiction, loneliness or caused their mental health to suffer, amongst other consequences.

As you know, there are very high levels of disability in Northern Ireland as well. You are going to hear evidence from Ms Toman of Disability Action Northern Ireland, but what she says in her statement is that the figure is one in four people in Northern Ireland are disabled, and another important point that she makes is about the prevalence of mental ill health in Northern Ireland as well, and that it’s the highest in the United Kingdom.

I’m really conscious that the term “disability” connotes a wide range of human experience, and it’s offensive to speak of it as though it refers to a single one, but it’s right that many disabled people would be particularly adversely affected by Covid-19, whether by their clinical vulnerability to it or the impacts that restrictions would have on them, and that this must have been obvious too. We know that every day disabled people face barriers to the most basic aspects of life that we take for granted: to move freely, to access accommodation, to travel, to work, to live independently, to have autonomy. Many of those with disabilities were clinically vulnerable to Covid-19, and you heard from Joanne in the film talking about being imprisoned in her own home.

Ms Toman also speaks to the far greater and higher rate of death amongst disabled people as well in Covid-19, and that’s besides other considerations like having their access to routine healthcare interrupted, and again you heard from Peter in the film in that regard as well, his inability to access proper care in respect of his sight.

But it went wider than this, it interrupted the access of disabled people to specialised treatments or therapies and of course Ms Toman makes the really important point that families and carers also lost access to important respite care and support.

We know that there are other people whose lives became harder and more frightening during the pandemic, the older people, children at risk, families living in poverty, the low paid whose jobs exposed them to the risk of Covid-19, and many more, and in Module 2C, like the modules that have gone before it, the question is the extent to which politicians were cognisant of those experiences and took them into account and assessed them as part of their decision-making.

My Lady, can I come back, then, to the political structures and address you briefly on the role of the Executive Committee.

Whilst peace has endured in Northern Ireland, the power-sharing agreements provided by the Good Friday Agreement have not always proved resilient to circumstance. As the experts in Module 2C explain, this is Professor Anne-Marie Gray and Professor Karl O’Connor, those arrangements have in fact spent more than 40% of their time to date not functioning, and various agreements have had to be reached in order to get them on foot again.

Critically important to Module 2C is that power-sharing resumed on only 11 January 2020, thus coinciding with information about Covid-19 emerging from China, and they were then again suspended on 4 February 2022.

In Northern Ireland government is exercised through the Executive Committee, it’s comprised of the First Minister, the deputy First Minister and two junior ministers and eight other ministers.

The positions are allocated to political parties according to parties’ strength in the Assembly using the D’Hondt system, it is a mathematical formula that allocates both the number of Executive posts to which the party is entitled and the order in which they choose their portfolio as well. So that means that the most difficult positions are normally taken last in the process.

In terms of the Executive, power-sharing in the Executive explicitly reflects sectarian divides or divisions in Northern Ireland, Nationalist and Unionist parties share power not as a result of any pre-or post election negotiations but rather because they are obliged by law to a share a power with each other; the experts refer to this as a form of coerced coalition.

Undoubtedly the role of health minister in Northern Ireland is one of, if not the, most difficult ministerial position and as you know after power-sharing resumed on 11 January 2020, Mr Robin Swann, who is a member of the Ulster Unionist party, one of the smaller parties in the Assembly, became Health Minister, and he, like Ministers Mallon and Long, had no ministerial colleagues on the Executive Committee. There is evidence that this complicated their positions, certainly with Ministers Mallon and Long the evidence suggests – and this doesn’t just come from them, it comes from civil servants as well – that they were sometimes marginalised in the process. I think it will be important, my Lady, to hear from Mr Swann, who again is the current Health Minister in Northern Ireland, as to whether his position was made more difficult because he was not from either main party either.

Just going back to the suspension of power-sharing, it brings constraints upon the powers of civil servants to implement policy into law and to take controversial decisions, and you might remember you heard forthright evidence in Module 1 as to the impact that that had on civil contingency planning. Obviously Module 2C is not focused on preparedness: the different issue that arises is whether or not the suspension of power-sharing continued to impact into the response to the pandemic itself.

Now, of course you heard from Sir David Sterling before, but again he has been candid about this, he reflects that the absence of power-sharing for the three years leading up to the pandemic led to public services being in a state of stagnation and decay, and again the really fundamental issue that arises is whether or not the inability on the part of civil servants to take forward a programme of radical reform in health services in Northern Ireland, did that condition inform the response thereafter? And Minister Swann certainly indicates that it did. Indeed, in April 2021 he is noted to have said:

“Pre-existing fragilities in our system also undoubtedly hampered our response to the pandemic.”

And I’ve no doubt that you will want to hear more about that.

So, my Lady, power-sharing in Northern Ireland has proved fragile, and that precariousness forms an inevitable part of the background to the functioning of the Executive Committee in January 2020. Obviously it was just resuming after a long hiatus, ministers were forming this committee for the first time, and embarking on all the work that had accrued over the period of suspension. There may have been other factors at play too. So, for example, in relation to Brexit, which is another part of the background, Dr Andrew McCormick, who is the retired director general, international relations in the Executive Office, puts it in this way:

“The legacy of distrust over and above the distance between the parties (especially the two largest, the DUP and Sinn Féin) that is a normal and continuous feature of our politics. The sharp disagreement between the two main parties on the EU exit issue itself was both visible and significant in exacerbating previous tensions.”

He continues in relation to the earlier stages of the pandemic:

“In short, the context was not favourable so it is actually remarkable that when the pandemic hit, there was not more fractious and difficult behaviour than there was. It is impossible to know how events might have unfolded had there been an optimum level of trust between the parties, and continuity of government in the years before the pandemic. But, all things considered, my assessment is that the deep tensions over EU exit did have some negative impact on relations at Executive level.”

My Lady, that fragility of arrangements impacts on the role, of course, of civil servants as well, because, different to their counterparts in other parts of the United Kingdom, part of their role is the facilitation and maintenance of power-sharing, or the mediating of political differences between ministers.

Again, Sir David Sterling explains this in his witness statement, in considering his role as head of the Civil Service, and his relationships with the First Minister and the deputy First Minister. And in relation to them he says that there’s a:

“… need to ensure you enjoy the confidence of both sides. Without this it would be almost impossible to fulfil the role of head of [Civil Service].”

What he speaks to in his evidence is this need for compromise and the impact that it has, and he goes on to speak of it encouraging a tendency towards the lowest common denominator, and again, my Lady, that may be an important issue in Module 2C as well. In other words, did the need for compromise impact on the sorts of decisions that were made in response to the pandemic?

So in Northern Ireland, there is no government of the day, there is no collective cabinet responsibility. Each minister is responsible for their own department and each permanent secretary is responsible to their departmental committee or as accounting officer to the Public Accounts Committee.

So, rather, ministers in Northern Ireland must abide by a pledge of office. This requires them, amongst other things, to discharge in good faith all duties of office, to serve all the people in Northern Ireland equally, to promote the interests of the whole community represented in the Assembly, towards the goal of a shared future, to participate fully in the Executive Committee, the North South Ministerial Council and the British-Irish Council.

According to the Northern Ireland experts in Module 2C, the lack of collective responsibility can lead to a siloing of decision-making and budgets, and, my Lady, if you think about it for one moment, you can see this: departments that are headed by ministers who aren’t just from different parties but who are oppositional to each other might well encourage a tendency towards being departed.

The term “siloed” may be close to cliché in a public inquiry, and also it’s sometimes a convenience as well to refer to decision-making being siloed, but there is some evidence that that compartmentalised sense of departments operating did have some impact.

So Ms Sue Gray, who begin will give evidence in Module 2C, says this:

“… by design, individual departments are not generally subject to central control, and … by law civil servants must act under the direction and control of their Minister. In those circumstances, it would not be consistent to require civil servants to serve the government of the day rather than their own Minister, and that inevitably led … to an element of silo working.”

Again, just coming back to Sir David Sterling, what he says is that ministers are expected by the Ministerial Code not to publicly criticise decisions lawfully made at the Executive table, but, my Lady, I think you will see evidence that ministers do appear to have been willing to make public statements critical of each other or of the position taken by the Executive Committee. And I think another thing that you will see reflected in the notes of the Executive Committee meetings is the almost constant references to information being leaked, and often during Executive Committee meetings themselves.

Again, this is a matter we’re going to turn to in evidence as well, because it’s really difficult to see how that loss of confidentiality in discussions couldn’t have impacted upon decision-making, still less in the relationships between individual ministers.

So, my Lady, the resumption of power-sharing in Northern Ireland and the emergence of the pandemic coincided with each other, as ministers took up their briefs and civil servants pivoted towards government with ministers, so too was the pandemic gaining momentum across the globe and alarms about it being sounded.

It is of course no part of this Inquiry’s role to critique power-sharing structures because they are quite simply the basis upon which Northern Ireland is governed and were voted for by the people in Northern Ireland. But of course we can focus and we can consider the role that individuals played with them, and that’s where the focus will be.

In relation to the Committee, as a matter of law, the Executive Committee must consider any matter which cuts across the responsibilities of two or more ministers, and if it’s significant or controversial or outside the scope of agreed programme for government. So, my Lady, what you will see is that in time the Executive Committee came to play a more prominent role in making decisions about the response to the pandemic.

There are some witnesses who have said that having the Executive Committee occupy this role made responding to the pandemic more difficult, simply because it took longer to get a response because there was a need to achieve consensus between them. But there is another side to that as well, which is that because uniquely in the United Kingdom almost all of the electorate were represented by a party who comprised the Executive Committee, so the other side to it is that any decisions that the Executive Committee did reach and were reached by consensus may have had a greater confidence amongst the public, and again that’s another issue to which we’ll return.

I think as well, if I may say, my Lady, it would be too blunt a tool to look at possible fractures in the Executive Committee as though they were just Nationalist or Unionist as well, because I think again, as you will see, those who comprised the committee had views that might be regarded as crossing other political lines, so from left to right, or more libertarian as well, so it’s a more complex picture than quite simply Unionist or Nationalist.

Asides the plurality of political opinion that’s represented on the Executive Committee, it was led by two women, and at the outset of the pandemic six ministerial positions were taken by women and four were taken by men, and it’s understood that the ministers do come from a range of different backgrounds, not just politically but in their personal circumstances as well.

My Lady, entering into power-sharing might represent the best of political ideals: the willingness to compromise, the taking of a risk for the betterment of all people, to see one’s opponents as essentially part of the same struggle as yours, to make life better for people. It might be thought that in a pandemic, and indeed the people of Northern Ireland might expect, that those ideals become even more important, that faced with a common enemy with the capacity to destroy life at scale that politicians would cleave all the more to the requirements of mutual understanding and respect.

But perhaps the most serious issue which arises in Module 2C is to ask whether that was the reality and did that happen, because the evidence suggests that over time, but particularly in autumn 2020, decision-making by ministers had started to fracture and to fracture along political lines. So a key question in Module 2C is whether or not there was an imperative for unity and did it endure, and if it didn’t endure, what were the consequences of that?

My Lady, I think that might be a good moment for a break, if that’s convenient to you.

Lady Hallett: Very well. Of course. I shall return at 11.30.

(11.12 am)

(A short break)

(11.30 am)

Lady Hallett: Ms Dobbin.

Ms Dobbin: My Lady.

I was going to move on to address you on some of the facts, if I may. I was extremely conscious in preparing this opening that there probably wasn’t going to be the time to set out all of the facts in as much detail as they require, so the Inquiry team has also prepared a written factual document as well that sits alongside this opening, and that will be made available to core participants, and I think if I can ask your permission to publish that on the Inquiry’s website in due course.

Lady Hallett: Certainly.

Ms Dobbin: So, my Lady, these facts are by no means exhaustive, I’m simply going to try and pick out some of the things along the way that provide some of the foundation for the thematic issues, and I may have to take it at a canter, so please do tell me to slow down if it’s going too fast.

So, my Lady, if I can pick up the chronology, please, on 22 January 2020, an official who was a member of the pandemic flu subgroup of the Civil Contingencies Group in Northern Ireland, and you’ll hear more about these various groups, but there was a pandemic flu subgroup, and this official provided a paper about sector resilience in the context of a pandemic flu preparation, and the paper noted that no work had been commenced on it due to competing priorities and impact on staff due to the EU exit preparations, and according to this note this had resulted in Northern Ireland being more than 18 months behind the rest of the United Kingdom in terms of ensuring sector resilience to the pandemic outbreak.

A submission was sent to Mr Chris Stewart, and he’s a witness who you will hear evidence from, at the TEO, who had responsibilities for civil contingencies, and this too referred to there being a critical lack of resources in the Civil Contingencies Policy Branch in Northern Ireland.

Now, we know that on 24 January 2020 Minister Swann attended the first COBR meeting, although it wasn’t until 2 March that the First Minister and the deputy First Minister started to attend those meetings.

You will know from the other parts of the module that there was an important email on 25 January from Professor Woolhouse in Scotland, and he had emailed various people in Westminster to say that, having looked at some of the figures that were now becoming available, that if they were put into an epidemiological model for Scotland and many other countries, that you would likely predict that in over about a year, at least half of the population would become infected, the gross mortality rate would triple, more at the epidemic peak, and that the health system would become completely overwhelmed, and that information was passed to the Northern Ireland CMO.

So, my Lady, that goes to the point about the exchange of information at the earliest stages of the pandemic.

And in the same chain, the Northern Ireland CMO thanked Professor Sir Chris Whitty, noting:

“As ever you are/will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting for us and providing much appreciated expert advice.”

I think, my Lady, at that stage certainly speaking perhaps to a reliance upon the Chief Medical Officer at Westminster in terms of guidance.

You will know that there was a further COBR meeting on 29 January, and again Minister Swann attended that. There was an official from the Northern Ireland Executive, Ms Rooney, who was sitting on the COBR meeting and emailed during it. She noted that the Health Minister had asked if the First Minister and the deputy First Minister were being briefed, and her email also noted that it was anticipated that Covid-19 would become a global pandemic over the next three weeks, and in reply Mr Stewart said that this was a stark assessment and that the First Minister and deputy First Minister should be briefed about it, and that a brief on existing flu plans with a focus on the TEO role would be welcome.

Ms Rooney sent a submission, as had been requested of her and approved by Mr Stewart, to the First Minister and the deputy First Minister on 30 January. She says in her statement that she then received a telephone call from the Northern Ireland CMO expressing, in her words, his dissatisfaction that she had prepared and submitted this submission, and that he stated in an email that given the professional and technical nature of the papers that he, as the Chief Medical Officer, would wish to clear all future executive papers whilst the Department of Health remained the lead government department.

As you will see, my Lady, Ms Rooney had prepared another note about the COBR meeting and she referred in that, for example, to an important CRIP that had been referred to at COBR that, for example, showed that there was coronavirus in Germany and France, and in fact referred to the fact that there could be asymptomatic transmission as well.

In her note, it also referred to the fact that all departments and DAs should be putting together a reasonable worst-case scenario plan building on the work that had been done for the flu pandemic. And again, my Lady, I make that point in terms of the kind of information that was coming into the Executive Office in Northern Ireland at that early point.

There’s another communication or an email exchange around this time from officials within the Northern Ireland Government, and in that exchange, this was between 30 and 31 January, there was reference to the fact that if the virus caused significant numbers to become ill and die with associated disruption across sectors, that that would be a pan flu type incident in which cross-government co-ordination would be required.

Mr Stewart again in reply to that email said that it accorded with his understanding of the central contingency arrangements in Northern Ireland, and he says this:

“… I did wonder why it appeared that stand up of a central operations room was being contemplated at this stage; so apologies if we formed the wrong impression. We will do some quiet planning on NICCMA …”

And again, my Lady, those are the central civil contingency arrangements:

“… stand up as a contingency, in the hope that the need does not arise.”

So I think that one sees there an issue which we will explore in more detail about what the role of the central contingency arrangement actually was in Northern Ireland in response, but certainly the indication there that it’s understood that it will kick in as and when Covid-19 arrived in Northern Ireland, and started to have consequences.

Again we see that again on 6 February, there was an important communication from the director of population health in the Department of Health in Northern Ireland, and this stated:

“I do not consider it necessary to activate NICCMA arrangements at this time, unless or until the infection appears in NI and impacts are experienced here.”

Now, again, by that stage – and we’ll come back to this – Sir Richard Sterling(sic) had certainly attended a meeting in Westminster and he recalled that it was being said at that meeting by the UK CMO that the Chinese Government hadn’t got to grips with the pandemic and that it would certainly become a global pandemic. So nonetheless, notwithstanding that that information was emerging, we see the indication from the Department of Health that the contingency arrangements wouldn’t be set up or wouldn’t take, wouldn’t kick in until such time as the coronavirus arrived.

Lady Hallett: I think you said Sir Richard. It’s sir David.

Ms Dobbin: Sir David. I’m sorry, there are a number of Richards and a number of Davids, but it’s Sir David Sterling.

My Lady, as you know, proximate to this on 24 February 2020, the World Health Organisation published a report on its mission to Wuhan, and it said that all countries should:

“Immediately activate the highest level of national Response Management protocols to ensure the all-of-government and all-of-society approach needed to contain COVID-19 with non-pharmaceutical public health measures …”

The very next day on 25 February, in a paper that was sent to the Executive office departmental board by Mr Stewart, he noted:

“Civil contingency arrangements in Northern Ireland have not been reviewed for over 20 years.”

He sought agreement to commission a strategic review of civil contingency arrangements across Northern Ireland to ensure effective arrangements are in place, to enable the Executive to support wider citizens and wider society, in the event of an unforeseen emergency event or situation.

Well, my Lady, you will note the reference to an unforeseen emergency, and I’ll return to that. But a prompt for that paper had been a report that had been written in November 2019 that had made some 85 recommendations about civil contingency arrangements in Northern Ireland.

And just turning back to Mr Stewart’s paper, it’s conspicuous that he identified one of the areas that needed consideration as being the role and the responsibilities of the Executive, and it also noted that a new relationship in relation to the Republic of Ireland in relation to civil contingency arrangements was an area of particular interest.

The paper made only passing reference to Covid-19, and ultimately stated:

“The Executive and wider society may not be prepared for, or have the capacity and capability to deal effectively with, an emergency situation should a major contingency present.”

So, my Lady, if I may just pause there, in terms of the end of February 2020, it would appear that proposals were being put forward that central civil contingency arrangements would need to be reviewed because Northern Ireland might not have the capacity to cope should a major emergency present. But of course throughout that February, that major emergency was being heralded, because Covid-19 was circulating in the United Kingdom.

But I think the critical issue is this, and the question that arises in Module 2C is where the Executive Committee was located whilst this was unfolding. There’s very little sense at these early stages of the Executive itself being involved in any of the decision-making or any of the planning that you might think was required.

So one of the key questions in Module 2C again, and this is a separate issue that arises, is whether or not it had the expertise or the resources to take any sort of different approach at that stage as the one that was being taken by Westminster.

Now, obviously Northern Ireland was in a distinct position, as a small jurisdiction it doesn’t have the layers of expertise and the sort of responsive structures that exist within Westminster in order to respond to this sort of emergency and, as you’ll see, the two individuals who led the provision of expert advice to the Department of Health and to the Executive Committee were the Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Scientific Officer as well, Professor Sir Ian Young.

You will see and you’ll hear evidence from him that in fact the Chief Scientific Officer was on leave because of illness between 12 February 2020 to 23 March 2020. It doesn’t appear, although we’ll ask him about this, that he had a role in advising about the pandemic prior to his having to take leave, but the fact that there was no Chief Scientific Adviser appears to have had a number of consequences.

So, first of all, Northern Ireland had no membership of SAGE, it’s unclear the extent to which anyone from Northern Ireland attended, certainly those early meetings of it.

Second, Northern Ireland had no modelling capacity of its own that could be set up in an emergency situation. It was only when the CSA returned that he set up such a group.

And, third, until it came together for the first time on 27 April 2020, Northern Ireland didn’t have an independent advisory group, so in other words the sort of group that could take into account the SAGE papers and outputs and other academic work and translate that into advice to the CMO or to other audiences.

By 1 March 2020 Northern Ireland had its first confirmed positive result for Covid-19 in respect of someone who had travelled from an affected part of Italy.

You will see, my Lady, we have the handwritten notes of the Executive Committee meetings and they’re much fuller than the formal notes. So from these we can discern certainly some of the discussion and the things that people said during it. In respect of the meeting on 2 March – and we understand that this was the first substantive discussion that took place at the Executive Committee – we can see from the notes that it was said:

“… most people – minor illness – like cold. 98% will get better. 5% hospital care …”

It’s:

“… widespread … Not inevitable. Need to be prepared for weeks/months … 50% … of population [could] be affected – but [a] lot of minor cases [very] mild.”

But this:

“Need to plan and prepare for all eventualities.”

So, in other words, my Lady, we’re at the start of March 2020 and there’s reference being made at the Executive Committee for the need to plan.

As you know, the UK-wide “Coronavirus: action plan” was published on 3 March, and it purported to set out what the UK had done already, what it planned to do, in order to tackle the outbreak, and I know, my Lady, you’re familiar with the concepts that it set out, and I won’t go back over those, but during Module 2 that document or that plan was subject to stringent criticism by some witnesses who thought it resembled more of a communication plan than a substantive strategy for responding to a pandemic that might threaten the life of the nation, and the evidence was that it was out of date by the time that it was published as well because the disease had already become established.

But again the issue that arises here is: how was that document perceived in Northern Ireland?

On 3 March the Executive Office provided a paper to the First Minister and the deputy First Minister. It noted that the focus was still on containment of Covid-19 but it did note that it was rapidly spreading to other countries, and explained to the ministers the concept of the reasonable worst-case scenario as well.

It also spoke to the need for increasing the co-ordination of the wider non-health work, which was the responsibility of the TEO, and referred to the fact that a meeting had taken place at the Civil Contingencies Group on 20 February.

My Lady, it’s unclear whether or not there had in fact been any other meeting of that Civil Contingencies Group in government in Northern Ireland.

The paper set out for ministers what the civil contingencies – what the arrangements were in Northern Ireland, and it recommended to them that they note the escalating position and the need to make preparation for dealing with a potential outbreak of the disease in Northern Ireland.

So, my Lady, just coming back again to that fundamental point, it was 3 March 2020. Looked at now, there’s an obvious question as to whether or not there was a significant underestimation of the speed and scale of what was unfolding. There’s very little sense in the communications of any urgency about the need to plan and respond within the Executive Committee.

My Lady, you’ll hear evidence then about a series of communications that came from Cabinet Office, starting with 3 March, and this was a commission from the Cabinet Office asking departments to set out what the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions would be, and departments were asked to fill out a table to outline the impacts and challenges across intergovernmental dependencies if various intervention options were taken forward.

It noted that this was work that the Cabinet Office regarded as likely to have already taken place, so in other words the Cabinet Office wasn’t asking for this work to be commenced, rather it was asking to draw on work that it assumed had already been done.

Again, Ms Rooney explains in her witness statement relative to this that she went to a meeting on 4 March of Northern Ireland cross-departmental working groups, and which had departmental leads as well who were involved in civil contingencies, and they are understood at that meeting to have had a number of concerns about the fact that aspects of the civil contingencies arrangements had not been set up, for example that there was no hub, which is regarded as an important feature of civil contingencies, having been constituted.

Ms Rooney says that she reported this to Mr Stewart, but that his response was that departmental colleagues would not welcome the standing up, for example, of the hub because it would deprive them of their staff.

And again part, I think, of what was being said at that point was that they needed assistance in order to be able to respond to the central government requests for this sort of information.

Again, on 6 March, Cabinet Office sent another email to recipients across the United Kingdom, again seeking information about the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions, and it sought a response – it was urgent – by 7 March, so the next day. And again Ms Rooney made inquiries as to who was going to respond on behalf of Northern Ireland about that, and it was suggested to her that this wasn’t a matter for the devolved administrations to respond to, and she didn’t think that was right, it would seem she thought that in fact they should have been. But it appears that in fact the Chief Medical Officer of Northern Ireland had taken the view that Northern Ireland shouldn’t respond to that particular request, and there’s an email from him which sets out his reasonings for that, and his response appeared to be predicated in part upon the fact that to respond would require modelling input, and he says this:

“In [Northern Ireland] as you indicate we simply do not have the modelling [capacity] to replicate and provide such granularity and have not previously sought to provide the same. Given the unrealistic timeframes it is not possible to provide any meaningful analysis. I am unclear as to why this has now been interpreted and escalated as a ‘must do’. This is a marathon not a sprint …”

And he referred in that email to the fact that this was essentially, if I may summarise, being driven by central government because of the position which had been reached there, but said that Northern Ireland effectively wasn’t in the same position.

When this was queried by officials as to whether or not they shouldn’t be responding, it would appear that Sir David Sterling in an exchange when asked – or, said this:

“… my choice is between annoying [the] CMO or annoying [the] Cabinet Office.”

Or, sorry, he was asked, that’s the choice, annoying the CMO or annoying the Cabinet Office, and his response was:

“If pressed now, my advice would be to annoy [the Cabinet Office] rather than CMO. And you can hold me to that.”

But, my Lady, just drawing back from that, there’s an obvious issue here, because the criticism has been made, I think, that the devolved administrations felt cut off, as it were, from central government decision-making, and we will see that and you will hear evidence about that, but it’s obviously of note that at this critical juncture then, when information was being sought by the Cabinet Office about what – the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions and what they would be – well, first of all, there’s an issue as to whether Northern Ireland was in a position even to respond to that. There’s obviously a second issue as to whether or not the planning had gone on in order to be able to respond to those sorts of queries. And then I think we see as well, then, that suggestion of Northern Ireland effectively having to respond but based on what was happening within England and effectively a response that was being driven by the United Kingdom as well.

There’s more important correspondence, I won’t go to that now, in and around this time about the approach that was being taken within the Executive Office about those requests for information, but eventually, I think some days later, a response was provided to the Cabinet Office.

Just coming back, then, to what was taking place in Northern Ireland at that point in time, there was a briefing prepared on 10 March, and this relates to the approach that was being taken to large events in Northern Ireland, and it appears from this note that there was no government advice to cancel large events, but rather that the organisers of large events, so for example for St Patrick’s Day, and for a football match which was taking place as well, that the organisers themselves had taken the decision to cancel those things themselves.

So, my Lady, if it’s right that Northern Ireland avoided large superspreader events at this point in time, it may be that that’s because of the actions that were taken by organisers, not the Government in Northern Ireland at this time.

My Lady, there was another Executive Committee meeting on 10 March, and again just looking at the handwritten notes of that meeting, the First Minister is noted as saying:

“Civil contingencies – have we got plans to handle?”

The deputy First Minister is noted as having said:

“[Executive] approach needs to kick in – all need to contribute.”

Other notes that appear on the face of this document in relation to the Chief Medical Officer being telephoned by various people from parties “don’t abuse”, according to the head of Civil Service that departments were to do impact assessments, there’s a reference to departments needing advice, there was reference to the:

“Taoiseach’s advice [being] different to PM. Our CMO and [Republic of Ireland CMO on [the] same page.”

So again, my Lady, I think the question that arises, given the late stage reached, why references appear to be being made there to whether or not, for example, civil contingencies had been arranged and were ready to kick in.

On 11 March, the Republic of Ireland announced a package of measures, and this included the closure of schools as well.

On 12 March, this led to a meeting between the head of Civil Service, Sir David Sterling, the First Minister and the deputy First Minister. The note of that meeting states that Sir David Sterling clarified that there were no medical or scientific evidence to support measures announced by the Taoiseach. The Health Minister and the CMO are noted to have joined the meeting, and that the Health Minister:

“… clarified that that containment measures are working in [Northern Ireland] and following the [Republic of Ireland] position would crash the NHS and create unnecessary panic and fear.”

We also know that the community testing and tracing was halted in Northern Ireland on 12 March and again it’s understood that this was because of a lack of testing capability as well, although again I emphasise it’s an issue for witnesses and something which needs to be examined more closely, because it’s not clear that testing was taking place on any great scale in Northern Ireland at that point, and as you’ve seen it seems that the focus, or certainly the stage in Northern Ireland that was still being said to exist, was that of containment.

So it’s not quite clear then precisely on what basis test and trace was halted in Northern Ireland on that day. And there’s also a linked point to this, and again it’s a matter that needs to be explored with the CSA, it appears that information was provided to him at some point by the Public Health Agency that over 500 contact tracers were in the process of being trained, but it’s far from clear, my Lady, as to whether or not that was actually the position, and whether and when that ever eventuated.

So, my Lady, just moving forward then in the chronology, a briefing paper was sent to the First Minister and the deputy First Minister on 16 March. The purpose of the paper was to facilitate consideration of the phased activation of the Northern Ireland crisis management arrangements or contingency arrangements. So again, my Lady, even at this date the central contingency arrangements in Northern Ireland had not been stood up.

The notes of the Executive Committee meeting on that day noted that there were 45 cases in Northern Ireland and that there was community transmission. And again, there appears to be a change at this meeting in that the notes speak of obvious anxiety about what was taking place.

The deputy First Minister is recorded to have said that they lost control two weeks ago, and that people were making their own decisions. The Minister for Communities referred to people being terrified and that there was a need to show leadership. Minister Long referred to the Executive parties giving mixed messages. There were references to ministers not being shouted down. The Health Minister is recorded to have said “We’ve been preparing for [the] past seven weeks”, whereas the Justice Minister is recorded to have said the “Executive always seems to be reacting, not leading”. The Infrastructure Minister is recorded to have said “We are mismanaging”.

My Lady, I wonder if at that meeting one sees on the part of the Department of Health their position that they had been preparing for the past seven weeks, but perhaps the suggestion that in terms of the wider context of departments, or certainly the Executive Committee, that that was not felt to be the position.

Similarly, the notes of that meeting suggest departments can prepare their own plans but they have to join up, and I think again that goes to the question of whether or not, before that point in time, whether or not there had been that cross-departmental approach that might have been expected by this stage of events.

There’s a message, a WhatsApp message, from Sir David Sterling about that meeting, and he said:

“The Executive meeting yet was excruciating, no leadership on display at all …”

There was a further message from Dr Andrew McCormick who noted:

“The [First Minister] and [deputy First Minister] could surely decide and state that all Covid-19 response and planning is cross-cutting and subject to a CCG NI.”

So in other words the Civil Contingencies Group.

Sir David said:

“That would be the sensible approach and I will push [for that] tomorrow.”

Again on 17 March Sir David observed in a WhatsApp message that it should never be underestimated how difficult it was “to get the simplest things agreed here” and said:

“Even in a crisis they are keener in scoring points off each other than helping the citizen.”

So, again, my Lady, that might speak at this point to some disarray perhaps on the part of the Executive Committee as to what precisely the position was, and as I’ve said I think that goes to the really important point as to the extent to which the committee had been involved up and until that point, because it’s only then on 18 March 2020 that the Executive Office actually activated the Northern Ireland hub; so in other words the operation centre of the contingency arrangements.

The first person to die from Covid-19 in Northern Ireland did so on 19 March, and in a meeting of that day the deputy First Minister is noted to have observed it’s a:

“… huge burden on [the Department of Health] – Robin shouldn’t be handling [this] by himself … we need to pull out all the stops and work together.”

Minister Poots is noted to have said:

“… as an executive we are behind the curve, we need to get ahead.”

My Lady, again, the question arises as to why these sentiments were being expressed on 19 March 2020, well after Covid-19 had seeded in Northern Ireland and after the first death.

Can I just point at this point in time Minister Swann made a plea to his ministerial colleagues that “talk at this table is not public comment”, that’s noted in the records and again it’s a reference to leaking, but as you will see that plea was largely ignored, it appears from the records, over the course of the following Executive Committee meetings.

So, my Lady, if I may just draw all that together, the same issue arises as has done in other parts of the UK, whether steps could and should have been taken earlier, Northern Ireland may have been behind in terms of the trajectory of Covid-19, but there’s a serious issue as to why its central contingency arrangements were activated so late in the day.

As I’ve already said, there’s a serious issue as to what exactly the Executive Committee’s role had been and was up until that point. Was it because ministers were blinkered into seeing Covid-19 as a health issue and simply didn’t give thought to the need for a muscular ministerially sponsored cross-departmental approach at a very early stage?

Mr Ovens, who was a special adviser to Minister Swann, makes this observation in his statement:

“Looking back to the period of January to March 2020 I do not believe there was clear Executive strategy in place. There wasn’t a sufficient ‘whole-Government’ approach – many Departments looked to the Department of Health and its Minister for action and direction, whilst at the same time failing to place enough emphasis on what they themselves could or should have been preparing for.”

He also says:

“… I also believe the Executive failed to come together as a single collective voice in that initial period. I do believe overall that the response in Northern Ireland was sufficiently rapid, but we were also significantly aided by the fact that the trajectory of the virus in Northern Ireland was behind that in other parts of the United Kingdom. Had that not been the case, I would have likely had concerns at the pace in which we were able to proceed.”

My Lady, doesn’t that seem like a really important point, that Northern Ireland was fortunate that it had been behind, but there’s certainly no suggestion that there was any push or advice being given when we get to 18 March that Northern Ireland should in its own stead be locking down and releasing (inaudible).

So, my Lady, I have set out in the written note what happened thereafter. If I may just pick up on a few other things, and I’m going to go through the chronology very quickly, but in terms of some of the thematic issues, there was a Northern Ireland situation report of 3 April 2020 which noted that the deputy First Minister had criticised the health minister’s handling of the outbreak. She had spoken to the BBC, and said that:

“Slavishly following the Boris Johnson model, which had been too slow to act, means that we’re not as prepared as we could be”.

Now, my Lady, I flag that up because I think for you it may be important to see what that absence of collective cabinet responsibility actually looks like, that you can be a member of the same committee and come out and say that, but I think there’s also a question as to whether or not that sort of criticism was fair in any event, in other words was Minister Swann acting on the advice of the Northern Ireland CMO. And additionally, and perhaps more important, is it really fair that anyone should have been blaming Minister Swann that Northern Ireland wasn’t as prepared as it could have been? Why, for example, were the deputy First Minister and the First Minister not also responsible for this? I think again, my Lady, that’s an issue to be explored in evidence.

Another theme that emerges at this point and which we’ll revisit is whether or not there was an issue about enforcement in Northern Ireland as well, because there’s certainly some evidence at the time, in fact there’s a letter from Simon Byrne, who was then Chief Constable of Northern Ireland, who wrote seeking clarity about the regulations, and appears to have raised the question of whether or not it was really right that the police should be involved in enforcement of public health measures in Northern Ireland.

I think, my Lady, you will see as we go on and look at what happened in autumn, similarly issues were being raised as to whether or not the regulations were being enforced quite as robustly as they could and should have been.

Another issue which arises is the fact that on 30 June 2020 the deputy First Minister and the Minister for the Department of Finance attended a funeral, of a Mr Storey. We understand that the TEO hasn’t been able to find the notes of the Executive Committee meeting that took place after that. The typed minutes simply note that the deputy First Minister discussed the circumstances in which she attended the funeral, but it appears that that incident of itself was to prove damaging to Executive Committee relations, and that’s something that Sir David Sterling comments upon.

Now, there’s been an independent review into the circumstances of the policing of that funeral, there has been a police investigation into it, as to whether any individuals breached Covid regulations by virtue of their attendance, and there’s also been a decision by the prosecutor in Northern Ireland not to bring any prosecutions, and it’s no part of the work of this Inquiry to go behind that either, but it does raise, obviously, some relevant issues, and one sees that the decision not to prosecute was based on the lack of clarity in the regulations and the policing approach which had been taken in the lead-up to the funeral as well.

And obviously that issue, as to whether the regulations were so unclear as to not be enforceable, is an important one across all of the work of Module 2, but I think that it also raises issues or questions as to whether or not – or the extent to which – damage was done in terms of relations in the Executive Committee, the perception obviously of bereaved people in Northern Ireland having regard to the funeral as well, and, third, whether or not damage was done to public confidence in Northern Ireland as well.

My Lady, I’m going to move on again quite significantly in the chronology.

By late summer – so Northern Ireland, like everywhere else, embarked on a strategy so that it could start lifting the restrictions, but by late summer in Northern Ireland Covid rates were in fact starting to go up, so Northern Ireland had to reconcile the reopening of society but in the face of rising Covid rates, and had to deal with all of the complexity that that brought with it, and the Executive Committee was again heavily involved in that.

My Lady, you will hear evidence, then, about the various steps that were taken in Northern Ireland to try and arrest what was happening in terms of the rates.

So local restrictions were brought in in September, but by the time it got to October 2020 the situation was really, really serious in Northern Ireland, and, for example, there is reference in some of the meeting notes to the Chief Medical Officer saying that he had never been more concerned as CMO than he was at that point, and seemingly urging upon the Executive Committee that they only had a short window of opportunity to take action, and that intervention now was required in order to avoid the situation becoming much worse in two or three weeks.

My Lady, we can see really at this point in time, then, the sorts of tensions that I alluded to earlier in the opening and you will see some of the references to some ministers querying the scientific basis for the advice that was being taken, and the concern obviously about the economic consequences of further restrictions or the effect that those restrictions might have in terms of health and mental health as well.

Really, it reached the point where what was being recommended – and this was by 13 October – that there should be a six-week period of significant restrictions, and again one can see in the Committee meetings that there was opposition to this, and we’ll explore that in more detail with the meetings.

But there was a short or a circuit-breaker type lockdown introduced, and the critical point came when there needed to be a decision as to whether or not that should be extended. So there had been a four-week circuit-breaker and the issue that arose was whether or not it should be extended for a further two weeks, so quite a modest proposal.

My Lady, that led to a series of meetings over 9, 10, 11 and 12 November 2020, and I think it’s really here that we see perhaps the most difficult point in Executive Committee decision-making in response to the pandemic.

So at the meeting it’s noted that Minister Dodds is recorded to have said that ministers were not having an honest discussion, that she was distraught with the tone. Comments that are recorded in the notes include:

“… this is about theatrics – [it was] leaked last night, leaking in live time …”

Reference to Sam McBride, who I think is a journalist.

“… you want to embarrass us”; “failure of leadership”; “DUP blocked all proposals – put lives of citizens in danger”; “Only Covid deaths matter to the SDLP. All deaths matter to me”; “Mid-December – hospitals [will be] overrun – will they take comfort from [the] DUP position?”

And it seems at this point Minister Long intervened to say that the meeting needed to adjourn or damage would be done to working relationships, and she explains in her witness statements that the original circuit-breaker had been brought in with reluctance on the part of some ministers, and it had been communicated to the public that it would end within the period set, and she notes in particular that there was an increasing level of resistance within the DUP to agree any further lockdown or extension.

Dr Andrew McCormick explains more about the meeting, he was there, he says it’s the most difficult Executive meeting that he ever witnessed. And, my Lady, it also involved two cross-community votes as well, and he explains what a cross-community vote is. It was added to the checks and balances to protect the interests of minorities through the St Andrews Agreement. I don’t have time to explain it now, we’ll explore it with witnesses, but effectively it enables a veto over certain decisions.

That cross-community vote was used at the meeting, and Dr McCormick has pointed out in his statement what he describes as the extreme incongruity of DUP ministers claiming to have a concern based on the interests of the Unionist community when the proposal was coming from another Unionist minister, the Minister for Health, although Dr McCormick did not think that the rules precluded it, and he also states or makes clear the tensions in that meeting, and the tensions caused by the outcome being leaked to the press immediately. And in fact we’ve noted in the notes of the meeting Minister Dodds was congratulating journalists for live tweeting the proceedings.

So, again, at this most sensitive point, when relations were at their most difficult, we see the leaking of what was going on, not even the outcome, what was going on at the minutes.

Mr Ovens, the adviser to Minister Swann, says this:

“Throughout my time as a Special Adviser, the Executive meeting held on 9 November 2020 stands out for being the most detrimental to political and ministerial relations. The meeting was tense, both because key elements of it were being leaked to the media but also because I believe the then largest Executive Party were struggling to grasp the need for action to be taken. That Party was also acutely aware that it had a number of senior non-Executive elected representatives that would have almost certainly criticised the Party for decisions it was being asked to take.”

So, in other words, certainly the hint there, but something to be explored by witnesses of the political considerations that might have been at play.

My Lady, it might be thought difficult, but obviously witnesses will speak to this, as to why anyone thought that voting on a cross-community basis in relation to important public health measures was a sensible way to proceed at this juncture. Minister Long describes the meeting as febrile and ill-tempered, and again one wonders in that sort of context whether it was the right thing to do, but witnesses will, as I’ve said, give evidence about that. But it will be an important issue in this Inquiry, as to that course being taken.

My Lady, that led almost immediately on, then, to the plans being made for Christmas, they almost completely collided with each other, so those important decisions being made, but plans being needed in order that people could come together at Christmas as well. And you’ll hear evidence, then, about the emergence of the Alpha variant, but you’ll also hear, and I think this is important as well, Minister Swann will give evidence as to how he certainly felt constrained about making recommendations about what should happen because of what had happened over the course of the meetings, and he being fearful that a cross community vote could once again be used in relation to those sorts of issues.

So, my Lady, that would really take us back then to the position in January 2021 and, as I referred to at the very outset, that issue about the extent to which there was a peak in January 2021 and the number of people who died in that period, and obviously the really critical issue which you may wish to explore and consider is really the extent to which what happened in autumn and winter of 2020, whether that bore upon or affected, or whether what played out in January 2021 is related to that.

My Lady, in that very, very short chronology, and as I’ve said I’m only trying to pick certain things, but there are a number of thematic issues that arise as well.

I’m just going to check how we’re doing for time.

I’ll come back to those thematic issues at the very end, because it’s probably important that I also touch on WhatsApps before I do.

Can I say at the outset, my Lady, we in Module 2C have approached WhatsApp on the basis that many people will have sent messages at points of extreme tiredness or pressure. Many of those people who preserved their WhatsApps would just not have dreamed that they might be featuring in a public inquiry, and we know that many people in extremis will have said things that they wouldn’t have said in person to someone and, as I’ve said, that they might have said – that they otherwise wouldn’t have said had they not been under the pressure that they were under.

We’re also really conscious that the people who preserved their WhatsApps are in this position and that other people haven’t preserved their WhatsApps. As we’ve said all along in Module 2C, the forensic value of them is that quite often they do just capture and they are important because they do convey what people felt and what they felt able to say in an unvarnished way, and that’s important because either they’ve forgotten many years later that it was quite as bad as it was or perhaps they’re not willing to commit in a witness statement to how bad it was. So they do have a value and that’s why they’ve been carefully considered by us.

So it was for that reason that this Inquiry, quite early on, sought the preservation of WhatsApps. So, first of all, in June 2021, when the Prime Minister confirmed that there would be a statutory Inquiry, the Director General in the Cabinet Office, permanent secretaries responsible for each devolved administration asking them to take steps to ensure that they’d be ready to meet their obligations when the Inquiry was set up, and departments were asked to ensure that no material of potential relevance to the Inquiry was destroyed.

Baroness Foster resigned on 14 June 2021. We understand that she returned her Northern Ireland Civil Service issued mobile phone but kept her iPad, but subsequently both were reset by the Northern Ireland Civil Service IT department, I’ll refer to that as “IT Assist”, which had the effect of deleting all of the data stored on them.

I think she suggests, and we will ask her about this, that in any event she periodically deleted WhatsApp messages when she was First Minister and upon leaving office, deleted any remaining messages.

Later on 16 September 2021, Ms Jayne Brady, who was by then head of Civil Service, wrote to all permanent secretaries setting out the documentation that might be relevant to the Inquiry, and this included guidance that it would include electronic documents including text messages and WhatsApps.

Then subsequent to this, in January 2022, Mr Connah, who is secretary to this Inquiry, wrote to Mr Tierney again asking that the message about retention be reiterated across departments and again Mr Connah drew attention to material as including emails, texts, WhatsApp and other communications, and again Mr Tierney wrote to all permanent secretaries including in devolved administrations reiterating that message.

So then when it came to Module 2C, in September 2022, it sent a Rule 9 request to TEO asking to be provided with information concerning the extent to which there was informal communication and requests were made to the Department of Health and the Public Health Agency and the CMO in this regard. So in relation to the TEO, Module 2C sought at an early stage to understand whether and to what extent informal channels of communication had been used in Northern Ireland in terms of the government response, and we sought that at an early stage as a foundation for further Rule 9 requests, so that they could be sent on a more informed basis.

It now appears that in May 2023 a senior civil servant, the director of Covid strategy, within the TEO was made aware that there might be a problem with the wiping of ministerial phones, and we understand that on 9 May one of her team emailed the principal private secretaries to the First Minister and the deputy First Minister noting her understanding that their and their special advisers’ devices had been reset and requesting confirmation as to who had provided the instructions to do so. The questions included who had instructed and completed the stripping of these devices? Did ministers and advisers return iPads and phones reset? And the email noted:

“We will need to inform the UK Covid Inquiry team of the status of these if wiped and why that exercise was carried out.”

I think the position reached in terms of the deputy First Minister’s office is that it was confirmed that their devices had been reset but that they had been returned to their offices reset, and the First Minister’s office explained that they had been returned some time ago and reset, as I’ve said, by IT Assist.

Slightly different in respect of the Health Minister, Mr Swann. We understand that in fact the Department of Health kept his laptop and that it was held in a secure cabinet in case it was needed for any inquiries. In other words, the message did appear to at least have gotten through to his office that his devices ought to be kept.

My Lady, we now know that there was a meeting on 11 May 2023 within TEO of its compliance and assurance group, and its members included the director of Covid strategy. We don’t know the exact circumstances of that meeting and indeed they’re disputed amongst the attendees, and it’s important for reasons of fairness to point out that evidence provided recently by the TEO demonstrates that a lawyer who was present at that meeting doesn’t accept that they were informed of the deletion at the meeting.

But putting to one side that dispute and exactly what was discussed and in whose presence, from the Inquiry’s perspective, what’s important is that the problem with the wiping of devices was clearly known about in early May 2023 and certainly by a number of attendees at the meeting.

There was an original note of that meeting that said:

“Noted that WhatsApp messages from Former Ministers phones have been wiped as the phones have been returned to a factory reset position. [M] is discussing this issue so that we can inform the Inquiry that all reasonable steps have been taken in relation to this information.”

My Lady, that minute was, though, revised a number of times so that in its final version, 13, it just said this:

“The meeting noted the position of TEO former ministers and SpAd phones.”

So we understand that that amendment to omit reference to the wiping of the devices was a deliberate decision taken by the director of Covid strategy.

May I make two points about it. There is obviously an issue as to why that took place at all, but in addition the original draft of the note rightly made reference to the need to tell the Inquiry that that was the position, but this didn’t happen for some time, and that was despite that the Inquiry had already asked for evidence about the use of informal communications.

The Module 2 legal team met TEO officials on 1 June 2023 in Belfast and informal communications were discussed, but there was no mention, again, that ministerial phones had been wiped or that TEO was looking into the possibility that they had been.

On 31 July the Inquiry wrote to TEO requesting detailed information about the use of WhatsApps, and that request was subsequently provided by TEO to all Northern Ireland Government departments and the Inquiry team had another meeting with TEO officials on 31 July and WhatsApps were discussed but it wasn’t mentioned again that ministerial devices had been wiped or might have been. And we understand that on 4 August Ms Brady the head of the Civil Service was advised of the data loss issue; and it was only on 11 August 2023 that TEO notified Module 2C of the potential data loss.

So standing back from all of this, the Inquiry lost many valuable months, having asked questions in September 2022 about informal messaging. It then took a further four months from TEO’s initial statement of their intention to conduct an investigation about the matter for it to provide an investigation report about the wiping of devices, and that report didn’t provide the level of detail that might have been expected. That’s no criticism of the author of it, but the Inquiry had to ask Ms Brady for a further witness statement in order to understand exactly what had happened.

But just turning to the issues that arise, I think fundamentally why did some ministers wipe their devices, given that there was a clear instruction from Cabinet Office and instructions given internally within Northern Ireland Government and by the head of the Civil Service to retain data and information? That raises questions for ministers and Ms Jayne Brady as well.

Fundamentally, how was it possible that other ministers’ devices were wiped by the government’s own IT department against the background of the instruction? Why did TEO not know before May 2023 what happened to the devices? And why did it fail to inform the Inquiry for three months that this was the position? Why were the minutes of the meeting altered so as to preclude the clear reference to this?

I think again, my Lady, there’s obviously an issue which has arisen in the other jurisdictions as well about the extent to which and just the use of informal messaging as well.

So, my Lady, I think that takes us to the end of my opening. I’m very conscious that my learned friends need to get on, and I haven’t addressed you about the thematic issues that arise, but I think you’ll become familiar with those in the course of the next three weeks when we hear from all the witnesses.

So unless I can assist you further, I think I had best sit down and pass you over to my learned friends.

Lady Hallett: Thank you very much indeed, Ms Dobbin.

Mr Wilcock.