Naomi Long says sorry after Arlene Foster and Michelle O’Neill fail to give media interviews over new lockdown

Justice Minister Naomi Long apologised for this during a radio interview on Friday morning, saying her understanding had been that the top ministers along with Health Minister Robin Swann would have been engaging with the media.

“We were all to make ourselves available to do interviews and so on today to try to explain what is obviously quite a devastating announcement yesterday for a lot of businesses, and I can only apologise because that does not appear to have happened, but I am certainly happy to do my best to explain what happened,” she told the BBC.

“We were in a situation where we were given advice that if we did not make decisions with respect to lockdown and more enhanced restrictions and quite a strong circuit-breaker, that we would end up having to bring in restrictions over Christmas and that we would have our hospitals in a pretty bad state.”