Covid inquiry ‘won’t seek to blame individuals’
Leo admits ‘mistakes were made’
IRELAND’S Covid inquiry will have a dedicated module investigating nursing homes – but it will not seek to attribute ‘blame’ to individuals, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said.
The inquiry into the State’s handling of the pandemic will be nonstatutory, will aim to conclude within 18 months and will seek to avoid the performative and ‘interrogatory’ approach seen in the UK.
An entire module will be dedicated to nursing homes, where 2,323 (27%) of all 8,545 Covid deaths in the country took place during the pandemic.
Mr Varadkar yesterday confirmed it would also span an examination of the public health service, Government and the wider Oireachtas as well as the media and social media. The Fine Gael leader said that he did not believe it was in anyone’s interests to have an inquiry that runs for five to seven years and costs tens of millions of euro.
‘We want to get this done in a year or two, not in six or seven,’ he said.
‘We performed very well as a country in how we managed the pandemic. But I’m sure that we could have done things differently, could have done things better, but we need to learn the next major public health emergency.’
However, Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín, who attended yesterday’s briefing, said that he believed the ‘no-blame approach’ was ‘politically selfserving’. ‘The Covid crisis in Ireland was a disaster for so many people,’ he said. ‘It had deep and devastating for so many people in Irish society. It was an unparalleled experience in Ireland for generations.
‘A mere evaluation by staff reporting directly to the Taoiseach in no way meets the enormity of what happened.’ In the briefing, the Taoiseach said that the objective is ‘not to ascribe blame to any individual, or anybody who made decisions or actions they did during Covid’, as everyone from frontline workers to central Government would have done so in ‘good faith’. ‘But to say that there isn’t going to be any blame, that doesn’t mean that we’re not going to admit to any mistakes,’ Mr Varadkar added.
‘Of course mistakes were made and it is important they’re faced up, to and I would expect that to be part of the evaluation. We do have to be comprehensive.’
Tánaiste Micheál Martin said he believed following the UK’s approach of an ‘adversarial legal inquiry’ would not be of benefit to Irish society.
The Fianna Fáil leader said the important aspect was to learn in order to be better prepared for future pandemics.
‘I’ve always made the point that if you go in with this sort of interrogatory approach, the next pandemic or the next big major crisis, you’ll have everybody looking over your shoulder, in terms of how would this look in the context of a future inquiry if I behave this way or that way?’ he said.
‘What you want people to do in the midst of a crisis is to make decisions based on best information and the evidence base before them and to have the courage to make the decisions and not be worrying about what, subsequently, inquiry [might follow]... It’s a very important point in terms of things of this kind.’
Mr Varadkar and Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly met with Opposition spokespeople yesterday as they finalised the terms of reference of the inquiry.
‘Looking over your shoulder’