Covid should not be politicised, Cork county councillor says during robust exchanges

Covid should not be politicised and those who attempted to make a political football of it should be ashamed of themselves, an Independent member of Cork County Council has said.

East Cork councillor Mary Linehan Foley made the comments in response to a motion brought by Fermoy-based Independent councillor Peter O’Donoghue calling for a public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic and demanding that it investigate whether excess deaths over the past three years were linked to covid restrictions.

Ireland has set up a covid-19 evaluation, rather than a statutory inquiry to investigate the response to the pandemic.

As he proposed the motion, which was seconded by Independent councillor William O’Leary, Mr O’Donoghue asked if lives had been saved by the imposition of restrictions, which were announced in a speech by then taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, in March 2020.

“The government of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party, which was fully supported by all so-called opposition parties, implemented the longest lockdown in Europe in 2020, causing a severe recession and an unprecedented rise in unemployment,” he said. 

“It shut down our schools, shut down our churches, shut down our places of work, shut down our pubs, our restaurants, any place one could socialise, shut down our building sites, stopped people from seeing their loved ones. [It] took thousands of our elderly out of our hospitals where those with serious illnesses had proper care and put them into nursing homes where the necessary level of care was not available.”

Ms Linehan Foley said that the motion was making political what she described as a “very sad and sensitive issue”.

“I have friends, as everyone in this chamber had, who died from covid. I have friends that would have given anything if the vaccine was out before they died,” she said, stressing that neither she nor anybody else in the chamber was qualified medically. “We trusted our government —and I’m an Independent so it’s not my government — and it was elected democratically by the people.

“We have to put our trust in them or otherwise we’re finished.

“There is an inquiry ongoing and we’ve to wait on the results of that.

“This isn’t political and anyone who makes a political football out of covid or anything else is wrong in my opinion — shame on them.”

Her remarks were broadly supported across the chamber and Fianna Fáil councillor Patrick Mulcahy suggested an amendment proposing that any discussion of covid should be postponed until after the completion of the ongoing inquiry or evaluation initiated last October.

Mr Mulcahy’s amendment was passed by an overwhelming margin of 41 votes to three and this meant that Mr O’Donoghue’s motion fell and wasn’t voted upon.