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ANDRÉE MUPRHY: Surprising how many things are unsurprising

WHEN there is a report of the significance of Operation Greenwich, exposing to the world the depth of collusion during the conflict, there is often a reaction in our community that says, ‘We shouldn’t be surprised.’ Should we not? I’m surprised that Ulster Resistance took the weapons they had from the South African shipment and billed the UVF and UDA when they distributed them. Should we not be surprised that Ulster Resistance, an entirely legal entity that boasted of members including the leadership of the DUP, doing the invoicing? I’m surprised that a report tells us that in February 1991, a cache of military documents which included the names of over 250 individuals was discovered in a raid on a UDR member’s home and that in on May 31 s Assistant Chief Constable saw fit to direct the RUC not to warn the 250-plus individuals that they might be at risk. And that the names included those of Thomas Donaghy and Bernard O’Hagan, who were killed weeks later, the person whose home had been raided a suspect in the killings.

ANDRÉE MURPHY: People are being targeted for delegitimization

THE New Year has been marked by a significant ramping up of the rhetoric against the Catholic, nationalist and republican community. There are online sites of incitement, with accompanying Twitter personae, that most of us ignore for the sewers that they are. However, last week a piece from one of those sites contained a foreword written by Kate Hoey and was endorsed by unionism. The piece criticises “anti-Union activism” within the theatres of law, academia, and the media where “There are very justified concerns that many professional vocations have become dominated by those of a nationalist persuasion, and this positioning of activists is then used to exert influence on those in power.” Of course, the piece is scaremongering, aimed at the lowest common denominator who thrive on fear and hate. And as the political environment in our six counties changes and we move ever closer to a change in the constitutional arrangements of this island, there will be nasty and concentrated attacks from those who refuse to engage with reality and try to keep us all in the past. However, that does not mean we can be silent when a Rubicon is crossed. Had this vitriol stayed on the website it was written for, that would be one thing. That it has infected unionist discourse and been endorsed by the News Letter and Jeffrey Donaldson is quite another. And that it has paved the way for vitriolic rhetoric from others, at once seeking to legitimise hate and delegitimise the work and input of human rights defenders, academics, journalists and others, is intolerable. What followed the publication and its endorsement has been the identification of individuals, who are prominent in their professions and also hold a public position on the constitutional question, as being said “activists”, and held up as evidence of and justification for this trope. That is not only tawdry, but also dangerous. We live in a place where terms like “pan-nationalist front/elite/cadre” or “returning the serve” were part of mission statements of loyalism that led to killings. To hear these terms now being used within unionism and more often than not without challenge is not only sickening, but also very worrying. When participation in public life is delegitimised by virtue of being nationalist, Catholic, republican or aspiring to a united Ireland, then we are back to pre-Good Friday Agreement fundamentals. Have Catholics, nationalists and republicans – Irish citizens – an equal place in this society or not? Does playing an equal part in society mean that any of us can be considered “legitimate” targets for demonisation or delegitimisation? There are valued members in our community, working for the good of every citizen living here, who had such targets put on their back this week. There has not been nearly enough condemnation, or defence of those being explicitly targeted. The Irish Government and the entire Executive must defend these Irish citizens. It is time to call this out before someone is harmed.

ANDRÉE MURPHY: Folk memories revived of grim flight years

WHILE I was growing up there was always a flurry of excitement when the monthly letter from Australia arrived. My mother’s only sibling, her sister Alice, had lived there from just after I was born. She was very dutiful and wrote home every fortnight. The first letter went to my grandfather and two weeks later my mother’s arrived. One of her daughters was the spitting image of my grandfather. He was not a demonstrative man, but he puffed on his pipe and smiled until he glowed when we would remark on the likeness in the few photos so gladly received. My aunt was a qualified nurse and had no bother being accepted for an assisted passage of emigration to Melbourne on a boat that took her to the far side of the world. Of course, having relatives abroad was not unusual. Three of my father’s brothers lived in England, he himself had lived in Manchester from the age of fourteen in the unending search for “work”. In later years he would travel to Spain and to New York when things were despairingly grim in Ireland. The story of Ireland, North and South, is tied to the story of Irish emigration. Generations of economic, political and social expulsion of the country’s brightest and best. My own generation, leaving school in 1988, left in their droves, not out of choice but with no real economic choices on this island. During the 1990 Presidential election, Fianna Fáil candidate Brian Lenihan came to UCD, where I was studying. I went to the hustings to raise the case of Dessie Ellis, who was on hunger strike in Portlaoise, and was roundly booed out of the place by the Section 31 generation who occupied the seats, but I was there long enough to hear Lenihan asked about emigration and his response was that we were getting a great education to go abroad with. Brian Lenihan lost the election to Mary Robinson in an election that is often cited as a turning point in social politics on this island, but those remarks rang in my ears as they caused such little outrage. Times have changed since then. There has been an economic miracle on this island and a transformation in social attitudes. However, there is a generation of young men and women who are still being forced to seek work abroad. Just like my aunt, the men and women whose vocation is in medicine are being forced by conditions and pay to look beyond their homes. Every single student and newly qualified nurse and doctor will have had a conversation with someone about how they can earn better money in America, Dubai, Australia, just about anywhere. And work in far better conditions where they are respected as professionals, rather than abusable skivvies. In the very reductive analysis of some people, the Executive was resurrected as a result of the actions of the nursing unions who pointed to the need for local administration. No-one who is being honest thinks that the core issues at stake in those strikes are resolved, or even close. Last summer saw 600 local nurses leave their careers, such is the strain they are under. The health services across the island remain in disgrace, but no reform is possible while its workforce is booking a flight in despair and sadness.

ANDRÉE MURPHY: Let’s get real about the climate in 2022

THE new year should have only one resolution – for us to seriously face climate change.We are destroying our planet. We are creating a planet catastrophe that our grandchildren will not be able to reverse. We have just emerged from the hottest year on record and 2022 will be hotter. Already we can see the toll it is taking. We have just spent a Christmas where we didn’t need a winter coat going out for God’s sake. There are fewer, far fewer, birds in the sky this year. Listen when you go for a walk, it is nearly silent in so many places where there used to be joyful birdsong. There are fewer insect smears on our windscreens, because there are fewer insects. We can feel and hear the catastrophe, but we are deliberately not paying attention.

ANDRÉE MURPHY: Despite much temptation, our Christmas table never changes

EVERY autumn I start researching new Christmas recipes and new decorations for my home. At least four magazines are bought, stuffed with the latest decorating trends and modern spins on the stuffing or the veggies or even the turkey itself. Some years I will buy a book offering additional ideas on cocktails and canapés, as well as how to do Christmas Eve and Day better. And since I discovered Pinterest, well, my saved files of Nollaig 19, Nollaig 20 and Nollaig 2021 are huge! But sitting here in Christmas week I have the same realisation I have every year. I might pick up one or two new recipes, or rather tweaks to recipes, but I will be cooking exactly the same meals I have cooked since my first cooked Christmas dinner fadó fadó. And those meals very closely resemble the dinners made by my Nana and my Mammy. The Christmas cake, made some time from mid-October to mid-November will be exactly the same Delia Smith recipe written in 1975 by the young cook and adopted into our homes. It is the same because it is exactly what Christmas cake should be: dark, fruity, with a hint of whiskey (or sometimes brandy). Although I do add cherries. I love the burst of sweetness when I bite the occasional boozy cherry, and I really miss it if it is not there. The traditional pudding will be served with cream, sweetened, and with a drop of brandy. The cold cream against the hot pudding, a few hours after dinner, is as wonderful as it has always been. And I will look at the eaters just as Mammy and Nana did: “How is it?” Hopefully I will get a smile or a thumbs-up this year too. The ham, in the big pot with cider, onions and carrots, to be glazed later on Christmas Eve with English mustard and brown sugar and cloves, is exactly the same as the hams that made me want to wriggle with joy when it was the meal to mark Santa’s imminent arrival. And the ham does the hard work of being the backbone of meals and toasties for the week ahead. The stuffing – prepared on Christmas Eve, ready for the oven to pop beside, under or over the turkey, wherever it will fit – is for my sons the most important part of the meal. I do have an unlikely secret ingredient which I do not share, which was given to me by my father. And it works. The turkey, prepared lovingly every year by my husband, does have a Jamie-influenced basting butter all over it. Brought by friends every year from Toome, it will be glorious, and its gravy will have a crowd of beggars around it while we are trying to get plates to the table, all with sneaky spoons trying to get that first mouthwatering taste of the meal. You see, for all the research, it always comes back to the same recipes because that is what Christmas is about. Our present connecting to our past Christmases, and the little child, waiting for the magic and wonder of Christmas, with all of its smells and twinkly lights and tastes of fruit, spice and all things nice. Whatever your traditions or whatever you having, may the magic of Christmas visit you this year. Nollaig shona daoibh.

ANDRÉE MURPHY: 1971: a year that set the agenda for so much

AS we approach the end of this year, we have marked some awful anniversaries from the conflict. 50 years since the Ballymurphy Massacre. 50 years since the killing of Kathleen Thompson in her own back garden. 50 years since the killings of sisters Maura Meehan and Dorothy Maguire on the Falls Road. 50 years since the shooting in the back of 16-year-old Martin McShane in Coalisland. 50 years since the killing of five-year-old Denise Ann Dickson in the New Lodge, 14-year-old Desmond Healy in Lenadoon, 14-year-old Annette McGavigan. And many, many others. All of the killings mentioned were carried out by the British army. Of the 171 people killed in 1971, 52 were by the British army - 30 per cent. Of those they killed, 86 per cent were civilians, including six children under the age of 16. This month has also seen the anniversary of McGurk’s Bar bombing. A bombing first blamed on the IRA in a campaign of disinformation, it is now irrefutable that it was carried by loyalism, or perhaps more accurately, by the British army in the guise of loyalism. Once these 15 deaths are included in the statistics of 1971 the total of British army implicated killings in 1971 reaches 39 per cent and the total number of civilians killed is 89 per cent. What is critical to understanding this bombing is not only the devastating loss of life, but that it was the harbinger of the escalation of the policy of collusion. From mid-1972 until the end of the conflict the British Army would concentrate its killing apparatus at the use of proxy gangs and agents, with deliberate and total impunity. The IRA also killed many people in 1971. 84 people were killed by the IRA. 49 per cent of the total deaths. Of those killed by the IRA, 30 per cent were civilians, 70 per cent were members of the British army or the RUC. Of those civilians many, including four-year-old Angela Gallagher, lived in the nationalist community. Their families grieve every bit as much and pause to remember every day. Remembering killings in the form of statistics is not something any of us would routinely do. However, it is sometimes informing. Individual commemoration, while vital, sometimes misses the big picture. This was the big picture of the northern six counties before Bloody Sunday the following February, when everything would change forever. In 1971 the conflict was not decades old. For many this was unprecedented horror on their homes and streets, from Derry to Strabane to Coalisland to Belfast. The nature of the conflict in 1971 was one where the forces of “law and order” targeted the civilian population and walked away from the killings with an understanding from the highest offices that there would be zero accountability for their actions of murder, torture and barbarism. There were many young men and women who watched what happened in their home streets and they responded to defend and, in some cases, to fight back. These young men and women would be in prisons in a few short years, on dirty protests and hunger strikes. And another set of anniversaries would begin. As we await the British government legacy legislation and we hear talk of the state being “only” responsible for 10 per cent of the killings and is protecting “veterans”, it is worth remembering the contextual year of 1971. And remember that statistics can be very subjective.

ANDRÉE MURPHY: Assault on legal aid an assault on all of us

I SEE the old legal aid chestnut was gamed this week. The use of the chestnut is to make people unsympathetic to the spending of public money on lawyers or categories of applicants for legal aid. The argument about costs usually begins with a splash figure of X number of millions of pounds, and then ties a chunk of that sum to one law firm or another, or one case or another. The argument casts defence lawyers or criminal justice lawyers, and definitely human rights lawyers, as money-grabbers, and casts defendants or judicial review applicants, and definitely bereaved families, as vexatious and altogether bad craic. That game sometimes works because it only tells one story and that story is only told through one lens. The resulting manipulated lack of sympathy gives cover to reducing or removing legal aid from categories of individuals who face the justice system, always to the benefit of the status quo. Of course, the people who are making those arguments are also the people completely happy to pay the state’s army of barristers, advisers, lawyers and researchers. Rarely pointed out are payments for not only the Public Prosecution Service (which is pretty poorly-funded), but also the handsomely salaried legal teams and the huge firms of favour who defend the state from allegations of wrongdoing. Millions upon millions come from the very same purse which pays out legal aid to the ordinary citizen – the purse of all of our taxes. But that is a too inconvenient truth when the far right want to scream about “millionaire lawyers” or “vexatious” and “pernicious” families. But truth it is. An attack on the legal aid system, whether it is by propaganda or by under-funding, is a backdoor attack on all of our rights. Legal aid, if working properly, should defend the abandoned, the harmed and the innocent. It should be the defending line between dictatorship and democracy, between an arrogant state and the defenceless individual. It is our mudguard against misrule. This Conservative Party know this, which is why they attack it so vehemently. This week the incessantly tedious Secretary of State Brandon Lewis issued a statement about the cost of legacy legal aid, putting it at £500 million, a conveniently round figure. With no detail or breakdown, it was of course immediately challenged as completely wrong by lawyers and Relatives for Justice. And so, in perhaps a metaphor for Mr Lewis himself, by week’s end, rather than being a torpedo in favour of the British government’s losing argument for introducing its amnesty legislation, it became a damp squib. They won’t care, though. They will continually use fictitious figures as a justification to themselves and others for denying bereaved families their rights to truth and justice. Tories are content with portraying legal aid as a racket, rather than the critical arm of the defence of the criminal justice system that it is. When we read connected headlines telling us that this government will ignore court rulings and judicial reviews we know where we are. Tied to a system that prefers lawlessness and self-interest to the rule of law and democratic governance. Our devolved government must endeavour to protect our citizens, and our conflict bereaved, from this far right government’s worst excesses. But many will prefer national independence to this ignominy.

ANDRÉE MURPHY: Charity begins at home for the new Arlene

ARLENE Foster hasn’t done too badly since being forced out, has she? She has moved seamlessly into the world of political punditry with her own show on *cough* GB News and has a regular column in the magazine ‘Local Women’. I’m going to admit I’ve never read Local Women, but I hear it’s big in some parts of Fermanagh. Many women when celebrating their 50th birthday look into the abyss of a future of financial insecurity, without secure pensions and facing the prospect of being forced to work into their late-60s, irrespective of any health conditions. Thankfully, it looks like Mrs Foster has not had that burden in her 50th year, and indeed new career opportunities have opened up for her, which must be a comfort to her and her family. But she also has time for charity work. Last week she was appointed to the board of directors of Cooperation Ireland. Of course, Mrs Foster won’t have to worry about finding her feet there as her old boss Peter Robinson is already on the board. It is an interesting board of directors where our former First Minister will find many common interests. Along with many illustrious names from politics and business there are four knights, one baroness, an MBE and an OBE (none of whom include Peter Robinson, who must feel a little aggrieved) and traditional Fine Gaelers John Bruton and Charlie Flanagan. Cooperation Ireland’s CEO and public face is former RUC and PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Peter Sheridan OBE. Boasting 32 years as a police officer he left the PSNI and joined Cooperation Ireland as its Chief Executive in 2008. Since then, Cooperation Ireland has positioned itself in a place of perceived neutrality where if there are visiting delegations from the EU or the US Congress, Mr Sheridan and his team organise much of the itinerary at the behest of the NIO or the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, or both. The organisation delivers a huge breadth of programmes to a point where it is a trusted one-stop shop for contested issues. It is charged with, among many other projects, delivering peace programmes for women, “tackling paramilitarism”, and their own take on legacy – “The LEGaSi (Learning, Education, Growth and Succession Intervention) project… with the principal aim of facilitating people within Protestant Unionist Loyalist (PUL) areas to strengthen their communities.” Cooperation Ireland is at the centre of much of the funding provided by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and the Ireland Funds. Indeed, the Ireland Funds describe the organisation as “the foremost peace building organisation in Ireland”. So impressed are they by its work, the Ireland Funds have directed £1million to the organisation’s LEGaSi programme. It is notable and contextual that it was only in June, following his incendiary interviews and pronouncements, that Loyalist Communities Council spokesperson David Campbell stepped down from Cooperation Ireland’s board of directors, a position he had held since 2011. Presumably this left the empty chair for Arlene Foster to join and bring her own understanding of loyalist stakeholders’ interests, as during her tenure as First Minister she regularly met with LCC members. Although one of the many questions for Cooperation Ireland after this appointment might be, where are the appointed directors to bring such clarified understanding of republican concerns to the board?

ANDRÉE MURPHY: This American tourist's heart waylaid by serious business

SO we got to New York and we were met by our great friend Ancient Order of Hibernians Vice President Sean Pender, who drove us to Albany. Mark Thompson, CEO of RFJ, has been many times to Albany but this was very very exciting for me, travelling on US motorways for the first time. I kept humming the theme tune to The Sopranos! For all that joy, after 23 hours travelling time, we were very grateful to check into the motel and sleep.

Mother and baby scandal a chance to learn

“THIS is one of the great scandals of our time – not just here in the north, but across Ireland, England, Wales and Scotland.” The words of Professor Phil Scraton in relation to the mother and baby homes. Professor Scraton was a member of the Truth Recovery Design Panel, with Deirdre Mahon and Dr Maeve O’Rourke, which this year expeditiously examined the experiences of women and children who went through the mother and baby homes and drew up recommendations for the Executive based on these testimonies and the research conducted by Ulster and Queen’s Universities. Their recommendations were victim-centred and welcomed by the victims and survivors of these pernicious places of slavery and torture. This week in a moment that should be acknowledged, the Executive stood up. It did not cherrypick at the recommendations of full disclosure, public inquiry and redress. It committed itself to full implementation of all recommendations. Announcing the Executive response joint First Minister Michelle O’Neill spoke in a unique way that should resonate across these islands. These women who should have been shown “love, sympathy and kindness were instead isolated and excluded. Suffering was compounded on suffering. Let’s call this out for what it was. Abuse. Violation. Women and girls who had done no wrong – punished for becoming pregnant outside marriage, punished for being victims of rape and incest, humiliated, subjected to forced labour, robbed of their babies, denied the truth. It was wrong on every level.” This is unprecedented language and official acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Importantly it is entirely victim-centred. No more and no less than these women and their children deserve. These survivors will now see the establishment of a non-statutory public inquiry which will have full judicial powers to access all records and will have a programme of financial redress from the outset. And it will happen expeditiously. It is heartening to see and a full testament to those who unearthed this experience, gave testimony to its horror, and demanded official accountability. It is human rights compliance in the face of unconscionable abuse. It stands in stark and heart-breaking contrast to the treatment of victims of the conflict, whose human rights and histories are being torn up in Westminster. What has happened in Stormont this week, however, should give all courage. Victim-centred processes are possible. Victims and survivors can be supported to express their own violations, and identify their own needs, and be part of developing their own remedy. This is not a novel idea, it is how law and international human rights law, in particular, is meant to work. It is novel for our population, but you know what? The sky does not fall in. The institutions are strengthened by a human rights- and victim-centred approach to past violations. This is surely huge learning that is transferable for all actors to the conflict, and in particular for the British government. The awful irony/truth is that some of these survivors will also be affected by conflict violations. They will be now coming to terms with engaging with a process for one part of their life experience and still campaigning for their rights for other, often connected, experiences. This week allows us to give thanks to these campaigners for their fortitude and courage and a mandate to endeavour to do better and more for all victims of conflict violations.

ANDRÉE MURPHY: We’re at a place where we always had to be

THE British Government is about to tear up all legal norms and all of their commitments to international law and introduce an amnesty bill for all conflict violations. Any day now if the soundings are correct. In parallel, London is engaging in extraordinary Brexit brinkmanship which could see the collapse of the entire Brexit agreement. Meanwhile, unionism is giving up all pretence of commitment to the Good Friday Agreement. It is all a perfect storm if you believe in the rule of law and the primacy of agreement over conflict. However, it is worth stepping back from the merry-go-round and recognising that none of this is happening in a vacuum. All of this was a long time coming and entirely preventable, but that it is all happening tells us just how much the British government cares for this part of their “United Kingdom” – not one jot. The legacy legislation is the British Government continuing its covert policies in an open way. Every single family affected by state violence and collusion has known the depths to which the British Government will go to hide its role in the conflict. When John Stevens came to investigate collusion his offices at Seapark were burned to the ground. This legislation is the new arson policy, they are just not pretending any more. If anyone thinks the current row about the Protocol from the British standpoint has anything to do with pot plants for garden centres any more, they need a quiet word. Britain doesn’t care about how many lobelias will be available in North Down next spring and they definitely do not care if the North Down garden centre-goer feels a little less British than the one in a garden centre in Finchley because the lobelia needed additional paperwork. They do care that Europe, or Europeans, or foreigners, might have the ability to call out wrongdoing. Given this government doesn’t want their own standards commissioner, a white woman with a CBE, calling out wrongdoing when an MP muddles up lobbying for principle and lobbying for a wad of cash, it is hardly a stretch to recognise this same mentality in David Frost as he chirps about potential recourse to the European Court of Justice on repeated bad behaviours. And as for unionism saying they no longer have confidence in the Good Friday Agreement structures, well, it is all a little tiring. The DUP has done everything to limit the Good Friday Agreement from the minute they got their first majority vote. From St Andrews to the perverse use of the veto to block basic human rights, the DUP has never shown one moment of commitment to power sharing. As for the Progressive Unionist Party. From the moment Dawn Purvis resigned following the murder of Bobby Moffett by the UVF, the PUP has demonstrated zero commitment to the Good Friday Agreement, except when community “stakeholders” seek funding support. Unionism just doesn’t like accountability or sharing power and they are crying about it as their majority fades and the constitution is discussed. So, let’s not pretend the weeks come as a surprise. We had to reach this point in order to meet the challenges head-on. Our peace agreement belongs to the people, not vested interests, and certainly not London’s current interests, and we will all need to call spades spades and defend our peace.

ANDRÉE MURPHY: PSNI must be removed from legacy equation

I REMEMBER the Black Mountain 20 years ago with its message for the Queen when she arrived to give the George Cross to the RUC. “Cross of Shame”. I remember the media flocking to victims of the RUC to get their “point of view”. 20 years since the PSNI was established is like a blink of an eye. Unless you are one of those families, forgotten about the day after that attention. I remember one of those families with Neilly Rooney at its head speaking about the killing of his nine-year-old son in his home by the RUC. And I think about how he spoke with such dignity, telling how there was not only murder but also a cover-up to prevent justice. Neilly is passed now and his family continue to seek justice. This year the Police Ombudsman said there should have been justice, but the passage of time has meant this is impossible now. Shame indeed. Another was the family of Pearse Jordan. A family that has spent more time in court rooms in Belfast, London and Strasbourg than any other. Hugh, Pearse’s dad, was the most formidable of spokespersons, not allowing anyone to denigrate his son or his memory and standing up for the rule of law. Hugh is dead now, but the PSNI stand indicted of perpetuating the cover-up of Pearse’s killing. Another indelible shame. The PSNI was founded on the promise of a new beginning, but for families like the Rooneys and the Jordans and so many others it feels exactly the same. On the Ormeau Road there are many families who await a report into RUC collusion with loyalist killers. This report is overdue and held up by the PSNI.

ANDRÉE MURPHY: South’s still not at peace with its past

IF this centenary is such a celebration, why is the Southern government not planning a Freedom Day series of events?

ANDRÉE MURPHY: Tories waging war on rule of law

I REMEMBER sitting in the Europa on the evening international lawyer Paul Seils spoke at the Pat Finucane lecture and he said: “Law is mankind’s greatest invention.” It hit me in a way that few other statements have. Law is the way we, and society, and even nations, agree to conduct business so we do not resort to violence, and protect those in need when they are most vulnerable. And that in theory benefits every single person on the planet. Of course, in practice life is very different. Look at the war in Yemen, where international law dares not raise its head, and babies die from entirely avoidable famine. Look at the 12-year-old girls in Afghanistan, who are now unable to pursue the most basic forms of formal education – the International Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women must seem like a sick joke. But the ideal is where we must reside. We must believe law can and must protect, as the alternative is that only violence, war or favour can promote the safety and integrity of the person. And none of us is safe if that is true.

ANDRÉE MURPHY: Covid report highlights catastrophic Tory response to pandemic

THE devastating report on how the British government handled Covid should give pause for thought. Thought for bereaved families and a devastated health workforce, but also thought for modern political norms where accountability is no longer achievable or even sought. The report outlines the political culture of arrogant dimissal with our generation’s catastrophe. It outlines how this culture led to the deaths of thousands upon thousands. The majority of whom were the most marginalised and vulnerable. It tells us how the intentional policies of sending Covid patients into homes for the elderly cut down swathes of mothers, fathers and grandparents before their time. It is a heartbreaking and enraging read that would have shamed any other administration into resignations. But not this one. Not Boris Johnson. For the truth of this report is that it not only shines a light into decision-making, but into a way of thinking. This British administration would make Marie Antoinette blush. Boris Johnson missing five Cobra meetings to have weekends off, to make divorce arrangements, to make birth announcements, without a word of apology or even excuse, tells us everything we need to know.

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Andrée Murphy

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