Covid-19 inquiry should not be used to find ‘scapegoats’, Gabriel Scally says

Public health specialist Dr Gabriel Scally has said a look back exercise into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic is necessary but it should not be regarded as an opportunity to find scapegoats.

Speaking on Saturday with Colm Ó Mongáin on RTÉ Radio 1, Dr Scally, who carried out a review into the CervicalCheck controversy, said the pandemic was a major event in history and the way it was approached “requires further analysis”.

“It is important we learn lessons from what went right and what went wrong so that we can prepare better in the future. Whether it needs a full public inquiry with the amount of time that would take,” he said.

“In many ways inquiries are best when they are not in public when people can speak their mind behind closed doors. You often get closer to the truth then having it all in public. So, I think it is a difficult decision to make.”

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Dr Scally said the faster an inquiry could be conducted the better.

He said he found during the CervicalCheck inquiry that there was a “tremendous tendency” of people wanting “heads to roll and people to blame”. He said any Covid-19 inquiry “must not be used as an opportunity to identify some people who will be scapegoats or have the blame heaped upon them for something”.

‘Search for the guilty’

He said some things were done wrong during the pandemic but that he was unsure if an inquiry “going looking for negligence” would be beneficial.

“The focus would become on that and I really hate these witch hunts. That is not what it is about. It is about improving public health for the future. Blaming people is not going to help us in the long-term. It is building for that future that is what is really important,” he said.

“I think it is one of the least desirable characteristics of Irish public life that there is always a search for the guilty. Sometimes a punishment of the innocent.”

Earlier, former National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) member Prof Martin Cormican told RTÉ's Brendan O’Connor show that he “didn’t set out to open a can of worms” when he recently said that certain public health measures imposed during the pandemic limited freedoms to an excessive extent.

Deprived

Prof Cormican said the effects of school closures were “most dramatic” and that children were deprived of their education for a long period of time.

“For the kids who were most disadvantaged, structured school was often the key thing that gave them structure in their lives, often how they accessed things, even things as basic as food was lost,” he said.

He acknowledged that Ireland did a lot of things well during the pandemic but stressed that there are aspects of the crisis that could have been handled better.

“The question is not how did we do compared to France, Germany or China, but the question should be ‘could we have done better, ought we have done better?’” he said. “I’m suggesting that me and everybody else should learn from everything we have been through so that we are able to do it better if something like this happens again.”

He said visitor bans in nursing homes caused unnecessary pain and grief to older people who were residing in care facilities during the pandemic.

“For me and for many people I knew who were close to me, how they lived and how they died was actually very important. And yes, there were some risks in having some access, but they were risks in my view we should have accepted.”