People who died as a result of Covid in Northern Ireland were “failed” by the response to the pandemic, bereaved family members have said.
On Tuesday Brenda Doherty, a leading campaigner in the Northern Ireland Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, gave evidence to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry about the impact on those who lost family members during the pandemic.
Other members of the group gathered at the Resolution Centre in Belfast to give their support and watch as Ms Doherty spoke on their behalf at the inquiry in London.
One of the members of the group, Micheal Lusty, lost his mother to Covid in January 2021, and said “life hasn’t been the same since”.
Mr Lusty said there was “no preparedness” for the pandemic in Northern Ireland, adding that he was asked questions surrounding his mother’s health when the hospital she was being treated in was triaging patients due to a lack of oxygen.
“They asked me how fit she was, and I said she’s a 90-year-old, she drives a car, she does her garden, she walks dogs, she cleans, she does everything that a woman does really,” he said.
“And they said how far could she walk? And I said probably about a kilometre, and I said why do you ask that question?
“And they said because there are decisions to make. I said what decisions and they said they were running out of oxygen.
“And I knew then that I possibly could have saved her life if I had said she could walk further. That was the Saturday and she died the next day.”
Mr Lusty said he was not permitted to visit his mother in hospital before she died, and the family said their goodbyes through the hospital window.
“My mum got out of bed, came over across to the window, we told her we loved her, she told us she loved us, and the nurse came into the room,” he said.
“We thought she was going to open the window to let my mum see us and she closed the blinds and that was the last we ever seen her.”
Mr Lusty said British and Northern Irish politicians let down his family, and lessons from the pandemic had not been learned.
“Every time you hear a different story coming out it’s disgusting,” he said.
“I mean, you hear of one of the ministers being able to drive 20 miles for a fish supper, parties going on round the Downing Street area. The prime minister at the time knew this was happening.
“But we bid by the rules, we were trying to keep our family safe, and they just didn’t seem to care.”
He added: “Our politicians must talk to each other. I don’t think they’ve moved on, I think if this was to happen again tomorrow we would be in a worse state.”
Anita Milliken joined the bereavement group after losing her father during the pandemic.
Her mother also had Covid, and is still suffering the effects of long Covid today.
Ms Milliken said an earlier lockdown could have prevented her parents contracting Covid.
“When my parents were in hospital, that’s when they went into lockdown and I just thought if they had have went into lockdown two weeks, three weeks earlier, my parents never got it,” she said.
“And then with all the different rules/regulations we weren’t allowed all the normal stuff if your loved one’s ill, to go up and sit beside them in the hospital, be with them, hold their hand.
“I did get in to see my daddy but it was too late, he was in a coma. So he didn’t know I was there with him. So my daddy was petrified on his own without his family with him.”
Both Ms Milliken’s mother and father were in hospital with Covid at the same time.
“The two of them were in a ward facing each other and I phoned the hospital to ask them could they please go in with each other and they wouldn’t let them,” she said.
“And when they were taking my daddy down to ICU my mummy couldn’t even say goodbye to him, they never let her know.
“It has affected us very, very badly.”
Politicians from Northern Ireland are expected to give further evidence to later modules of the inquiry on the pandemic response in the region.
Ms Milliken said there was nothing they could say that would change what her family suffered as a result of decisions made during the pandemic.
“The biggest apology in the world will never be good enough for us because we’re left with this, totally left with it,” she said.
Geraldine Treacy is another member of the group whose mother died in a care home in the early days of the pandemic, in April 2020.
Ms Treacy said the rules and guidance throughout the pandemic in Northern Ireland were “very, very confusing”.
“The (care) home phoned me a couple of weeks later at the beginning of April to tell me that the Covid had actually gotten into the home,” she said.
“And I asked how did that happen? And they said that they were taking in patients from hospital and it had come in from a patient from the hospital.
“And I said, you know, well, that shouldn’t have happened and how did that happen? And they told me that they were told that they had to be available to receive patients from hospital or they would lose their funding.”
She added: “My mum caught Covid just shortly after, she had dementia.
“I was very angry and I still am angry because at the time we were being told to protect our elderly and look after the vulnerable and keep our distances and for them to stay at home and you couldn’t have anybody in with them in their home.
“But the (care) home was my mum’s home, and they were actively putting sick people into my mum’s home so she had no choice in the matter. She wasn’t able to defend herself.”
Ms Treacy shared the frustrations with the political response to the pandemic expressed by other members of the group for bereaved families.
“I think my mum was abandoned, I do think that she was failed by everyone,” she said.
“And you know, whenever I joined this group, the thing that amazed me was, my mum did die early on and it was chaos and there was so much confusion at the beginning.
“But I’ve met people whose family members died a year later, a year and a half later, and it’s the same story.
“So nothing had changed in all that time, it just seemed total panic all the time.
“Right now we have still got Covid. Covid is still happening all the time, and we need to be able to learn how to cope with these things.
“Because if a new pandemic comes along, and everyone says there will be a new pandemic, we need to be able to look after our old, our vulnerable and our children in a far better way than what we did this time.”
