Mourners across Northern Ireland have obeyed Covid funeral rules so the PSNI must tackle calculated breaches

Since shortly after lockdown began in March, there have been several IRA funerals that have breached Covid regulations, or at least guidelines.

The biggest of those was the Bobby Storey funeral in west Belfast, attended by thousands of people and facilitated by the PSNI (later given special treatment at Roselawn cemetery by Belfast City Council, which was closed so that the IRA godfather could get a send-off denied to other grieving families).

The latest IRA funeral was that of Eamonn McCourt.

It is a scandal that people are being fined for gathering outside when their only intention is exercise, yet these terrorist funerals keep getting special exemptions.

The PSNI is in a difficult situation. The Northwest has a dangerous dissident republican terror threat, so intervening in the funeral of a past republican terrorist would spark uproar, with Sinn Fein perhaps leading the criticism.

And after all, when the PSNI rightly fined protestors at the second Black Lives Matters protests in June (having ignored a flagrant breach of the rule on no gatherings of more than six people at a first mass protest) the Police Ombudsman found they had breached the protestors’ human rights. The police should have stood their ground, but rushed into an apology.

This is not a promising context for the police making clear that terrorists do not get funeral exemptions.

But think of the nearly 20,000 people who have died in Northern Ireland since last March. Almost all funerals have been curtailed, with the goodwill of people who obey laws.

The police have a duty to be fair to those people, despite the sensitivities in taking action against terrorist funerals. Taking a stand is all the harder when, disgracefully, the deputy first minister still insists she did nothing wrong at the Storey funeral.

The PSNI is operating in a dysfunctional system. But it is isuing fines to easy targets. If we live in a society that decides fines are needed to tackle Covid, then the tricky matter of tackling terrorist funerals must happen.

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