Varadkar cautions inquiry into State’s Covid-19 response ‘will take time’

A full public inquiry into the State’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic will not be “done quickly” and “will take time”, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said.

Mr Varadkar is “determined” to have an inquiry up and running in 2023, “ideally by the middle of the year”, he told Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín during Leaders’ Questions in the Dáil on Wednesday.

Mr Tóibín said information given to his party by the HSE showed that well over 40 per cent of Covid-19 deaths in Ireland were linked to hospital or nursing home outbreaks. He also said that 44 families are starting legal action against the State “as a result of what happened”.

The Aontú leader asked why the Government was opposed to a “public investigation that would find out the truth and provide justice for families who’ve lost a loved one so tragically.

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“Throughout Covid, the Government was focused on restricting people to two kilometres from their homes, preventing people from going to funerals, to school and to work, when in reality, the most dangerous place you could be was in a nursing home or hospital; the two locations run or regulated by the State,” he said.

“No Government could get everything right, we accept that, but there were serious and disastrous mistakes made during Covid.”

In response, the Taoiseach said it was always going to be the case that “with hindsight, things will look differently than they did at the time when we had so little information”.

Mr Varadkar said he remembered former chief executive of the HSE Paul Reid saying at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic that there was no “roadmap”, “playbook” or “lived experience” as to how to deal with a pandemic of that nature.

Exact format

“[He said] we would probably get about 70 per cent of things right and 30 per cent of things wrong and I think that’s probably correct,” Mr Varadkar said. “But it is important that we find out what we got right and what we got wrong and that’s why there will be a public inquiry.”

The Fine Gael leader said a public inquiry would be established this year to examine how the pandemic was handled in Ireland, covering healthcare aspects, testing, public health advice and the economic and social response.

“The exact format of that [inquiry] we haven’t decided on yet, but I do want it to be done properly and whether that’s using the commission investigations mechanism, which has its pros and cons, or a tribunal mechanism or a different mechanism,” he said.

“I’m open to that being considered but there are pluses and minuses to all of these all of these mechanisms.

“I don’t think it will be done quickly, by the way, I think it will take time to do a property but I’m determined to have that up and running this year, ideally by the middle of the year.”

Mr Varadkar added he was sure there were people who went into hospital who were in good health and contracted the virus and died of it.

“Unfortunately that does happen in healthcare and it’s never something anybody wants to see happen.

“But the vast majority of people who died of Covid in Ireland were people who were elderly, people who had underlying medical conditions, and that is how viruses work and that would have been the case in the community as well as hospitals and as well as nursing homes,” he said.

“We shouldn’t create the impression that all or even most of those deaths were preventable.”