I back contact tracing, insists MP Paisley despite ‘joke’ that he wouldn’t agree to it

AS the track and trace scheme in England got off to a shaky start yesterday, it emerged that North Antrim MP Ian Paisley had accidentally emailed hundreds of MPS saying he “wouldn’t let any government, least of all the NI executive track and trace me and my movements!”

The email was seen by Sunday Times journalist Gabriel Pogrund, who shared the story on social media, adding that Mr Paisley said he was “responding in a ‘jocular manner’, and backs efforts to support health of the nation”.

Contacted by the Belfast Teleto graph last night, the MP was reluctant to comment further on the email.

“It is what it is,” he said. Earlier First Minister and DUP leader Arlene Foster told a Stormont press conference that the Northern Ireland contact tracing scheme was the “cornerstone of what we are doing to try to control the virus”.

She said she was “very pleased that we are the first part of the UK to have contact tracing in place and I hope that everyone realises were ahead in relation to that”.

Meanwhile, in England the new contact-tracing scheme suffered from major technical problems yesterday, with staff unable

even log in for most of the day and many only notified the night before that it was going live and that they would be needed.

And the Government’s track and trace tsar admitted to MPS that the whole system would not actually be “fully operational” until the end of next month, with still no date set for the launch of the supposedly “world-beating” app promised by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Contact-tracers working on the programme said that when they finally managed to log into the system at the end of the working day they were presented with an empty page that contained no cases to review.