Opinion

Newton Emerson: Stormont's top priority must be restoring access to healthcare

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

Hospital waiting lists in Northern Ireland are among the worst in the NHS
Hospital waiting lists in Northern Ireland are among the worst in the NHS Hospital waiting lists in Northern Ireland are among the worst in the NHS

If we are heading into at least another six months of covid restrictions, restoring access to healthcare must be Stormont’s top priority. Hospitals are barely back to half capacity and may now face being emptied again, leaving tens of thousands of people without urgent medical care.

A focus on pubs, restaurants, tourism and shopping is understandable with so many livelihoods at stake but the political disinterest in how many lives are at stake from half-shut hospitals is bizarre. The number one objective in the first wave was to stop the NHS being overwhelmed. Experience has shown that danger to be less than feared, yet the strategy seems to have been left on autopilot.

Even in normal times, the health service in Northern Ireland embarks on frequent waiting list initiatives by setting up temporary specialist clinics or buying in private capacity - much of which can take place in self-contained settings, helping manage covid risk.

The need for such action is now off the charts. So where is it?

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The custom among Northern Ireland’s students of going home every weekend has always been a hygiene problem - no 18-year-old cleans a bathroom they only use for four nights at a stretch. Now it could prove a serious threat to public health.

Students are thought to be particularly likely to catch coronavirus, with students here particularly likely to spread it: no comparable figures on home visits are collected but Arlene Foster has said Northern Ireland has a “unique” issue. In Britain, the government is mainly worried about students returning home at the end of term.

None of this has been a factor in our epidemic so far because universities across the UK have either been locked down or on holiday.

The potential for disaster is all the more alarming for having no precedent to judge.

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The DUP suffered excruciating humiliation in the Commons as it tried to amend the government’s new international law-breaking UK Internal Markets Bill. The party wanted to add a requirement for Stormont consent on any “trade frictions” for goods travelling from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.

This was not so far away from the Bill’s alleged intention for the DUP to have expected some support. However, not a single MP from another party voted with it. Every Conservative MP voted against and Labour scornfully abstained.

In a final embarrassment, two of the DUP’s eight MPs had to act as tellers, reducing its vote to six.

How the mighty confidence and supply partners have fallen, as everyone else at Westminster undoubtedly observed.

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The UK Internal Markets Bill undermines the Good Friday Agreement because a government that will tear up one treaty might tear up another. But the bill does not actually breach the agreement, as the assembly recognised this week when it passed an SDLP motion against it. The motion’s careful wording referred only to the bill “not being necessary to protect the Good Friday Agreement” (as claimed by the government) and “undermining the authority of the devolved institutions” (it tweaks their powers, but well within what the agreement permits.)

Hopefully this marks a move away from claiming everything breaches the agreement, which ironically has itself undermined the agreement.

Undermining the agreement is bad enough.

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A statement from a number of rights groups, including the Human Rights Consortium and the Committee for the Administration of Justice, has correctly pointed out the UK Internal Markets Bill is not just about trade.

However, the statement seemed confused in warning of a “threat to the agreement” because “this bill fetters the ability of our devolved government to continue to take the progressive actions required to protect rights and standards in Northern Ireland, if the UK government disagrees.”

Protection of human rights standards is not devolved, as per the agreement. The rights sector might remember this from its celebrations last year when Westminster legislated for same-sex marriage and abortion.

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Arlene Foster and Michelle O’Neill have failed to agree on a new head of the civil service, after interviewing the final shortlist of candidates.

Given Stormont’s track record in similar situations, it is not entirely fanciful to wonder if we will have two heads of the civil service, or a head and a deputy head - or five heads, one for each executive party, as with the 2008 appointment of four victims commissioners.

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Ulster GAA has strongly condemned a pitch invasion and other scenes of social non-distancing after a county football final in Omagh.

So it is a mystery why others struggled to do the same. Deputy first minister Michelle O’Neill merely “noted” the GAA’s condemnation, while she and may other party figures issued boilerplate statements about the association’s “exceptional” community leadership, as these things were not one and the same thing.

Radio Ulster presenter Stephen Nolan then came in for criticism for reporting the pitch invasion without listing the GAA’s many fine qualities

Few of his critics balanced their condemnation by mentioning Nolan’s record of enraging the DUP.

If every story in Northern Ireland must be introduced with a full accounting of the good and the bad, we will be here all day.