The science that restricted gatherings such as the Last Saturday parades does not seem to exist

This year the fear of Covid-19 made the Last Saturday parades in Northern Ireland a muted affair.

Parades and assemblies of people within Northern Ireland were limited by the health minister Robin Swann to between 15 and 30 people depending upon the interpretation of the Covid-emergency legislation by individual bands, individual preceptories and the Royal Black Institution.

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, government has imposed upon the population emergency legislation which it says is evidenced based.

his is the right and duty of government. However, government also has a legal obligation to inform the people and the wider legal and scientific community about the expert science that frames the emergency legislation.

Any law that is enacted by Parliament or by the NI Assembly that exceeds its purpose, or which is not based upon sound legal (scientific) reasoning is flawed and will fall.

The courts will not allow government to cast aside fundamental rights unless the law which denies those rights is framed on precise and exact logical reasoning.

The right to assembly is a human right enshrined by a global convention and it is a right that every trade unionist and person of faith should seek to protect.

In terms of the maximum numbers of people that can gather inside and outside and how these numbers can change in relation to the changing R number, government has never published any scientific explanation to support its legislation.

There is also another serious flaw in the Covid-19 emergency legislation in NI.

The legislation allows for individuals undertaking a parade, or an outdoor event to undertake a ‘risk assessment’ to increase the parading numbers above the magical 15 permitted.

The risk assessment is then submitted to the PSNI for approval. But no member of the public and no police inspector has the scientific data to be able to either undertake this risk assessment or to check out the risk assessment.

For ten years, within two different employment sectors, I was responsible for preparing and assessing all manner of risk assessments.

The data to undertake a Covid-19 risk assessment on outdoor events is not sufficiently transparent.

The NI executive, the PSNI and the Parades Commission have been imposing restrictions on loyal order parades without sufficient justification.

Those who demonstrated in Berlin and London yesterday no doubt agree with my analysis.

No one outside of an elite group of politicians knows anything about the scientific calculation which determines whether it is safe / unsafe for 15 or 30 people to gather at any event.

Importantly, the scientific or the medical community cannot accept anything that masquerades as science if the science is not published and if the wider body of scientists are denied an opportunity to peer review, audit, check and recheck the scientific hypothesis, its methodology and its methods of calculation.

In the absence of any scientific publication, the expert science that suggested on Black Saturday that only 15 people could parade does not exist. Publish and (or) be damned!

Without publication, there is no ‘science’. If the legislation is flawed, it is incumbent upon all democrats to question it.

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