Ireland’s Covid ‘evaluation’ will avoid UK’s ‘gotcha’ moments – but critics say it looks tokenistic

The long-promised inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic must ask three key questions if it is to be successful: what happened? Who was responsible for the decisions made throughout? And how can we do better next time?
In moving to establish the inquiry, Ministers have said numerous times that the inquiry should not turn into a “blaming” exercise where fingers are pointed. At the same time, the Government also wants the buy-in and trust of the public, who will surely want the evaluation to take an unflinching look at those long two years. Opposition politicians have made the point that it is possible to have an inquiry that does not go down the road of apportioning blame, but still gets to the bottom of how decisions were made (or, indeed, not made) and who was responsible.
The pandemic evaluation is expected to be up and running “in a matter of weeks” and will be chaired by retired NUIG professor Anne Scott.
Taoiseach Simon Harris said on Thursday that it was “for that independent chair to decide how best she and her panel wish to conduct that and, of course, any extra assistance or advice or powers that she believes she needs, of course, Government will absolutely keep an open mind of that”.
So what powers will the inquiry have, and how does it compare to the inquiry run by, say, the UK government?
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The Irish inquiry is not judge-led, it will be entirely voluntary and have no powers of compellability and its secretariat will be drawn from the Civil Service. The inquiry will rely on people voluntarily taking part. The Government’s line is that it does not foresee any stonewalling.
In the UK, the Covid-19 inquiry was chaired by Baroness Heather Hallett, who was given power to subpoena witnesses, require the disclosure of evidence and hear testimony under oath.
Government officials believe it is entirely unfair to compare Ireland’s handling of the pandemic to that of the UK, where more than 230,000 Covid-related deaths were recorded, and they believe that a different sort of inquiry was warranted across the water. In Ireland, 9,366 deaths had been recorded when the official data hub stopped regular updates in November 2023.
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The Irish Times has spoken to a number of Government figures who believe that the UK inquiry became bogged down in WhatsApp gossip and he-said, she-said. Some believe it became a “gotcha” spectacle which took away from the point of the thing: to find out how to handle a pandemic better in future, and save lives.
Yet even the terms of reference for the Irish inquiry differ from the UK inquiry in some subtle but important ways.
The Irish inquiry will “provide a factual account of the overall strategy and approach”, “identify lessons learned” and “recommend guiding principles … to guide future decision-making”.
The terms of reference for the UK inquiry went further. They outlined how the inquiry would investigate “how decisions were made, communicated, recorded and implemented”.
One Government source said last night that it would be a matter for Prof Scott to structure her inquiry, decide on staffing levels and gain that key element of public trust.
Opposition politicians are not fully convinced.
Labour leader Ivana Bacik said announcing the “bare bones” of an inquiry the week before the Dáil is likely to be dissolved “looks rather tokenistic”. She highlighted concerns around whether all hearings would be held in public.
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said “compellability is necessary to deliver transparency, closure, and accountability.”
Tánaiste Micheál Martin, who was taoiseach for much of the pandemic, said on Thursday that if any issues or “difficulties” arose during the course of the inquiry, “then it falls to a new government to review that”, in comments which could well pave the way for the structure of the inquiry to become a general election issue.