Sam McBride: This deadly challenge will make or break Stormont – and so many lives

The night before Stormont was restored in January, the widespread view within the Ulster Unionist Party was that it would again opt to enter opposition.

Even when that shifted and party leader Steve Aiken told Mr Swann that he would be the party’s candidate for a ministry, the North Antrim MLA expected another portfolio – perhaps agriculture, in which he has expertise.

But although health is the biggest Stormont department, all of the bigger parties passed up what is widely perceived as a political banana skin where a minister gets blamed for every disaster and gets no credit for the successes.

By the time the UUP, now a shrivelled skeleton of the party which built Northern Ireland, got its first and only choice of a ministry there were only two left – and it chose health.

Mr Swann, who less than four months earlier had stood down as Ulster Unionist leader because he believed that the strain on his young family was untenable, suddenly found himself in charge of a health service which just weeks earlier the Royal College of Surgeons had described as being “at the point of collapse”.

Now, just weeks later, the North Antrim MLA faces a crisis built on a crisis, managing the response to a pandemic in which thousands of people may die.

An unassuming and pragmatic politician, Mr Swann is well regarded across the political spectrum at Stormont and he has spoken of his appreciation for how the health service saved the life of his young son who was born with a heart defect.

That background – and the fact that unlike the more controversial Arlene Foster and Michelle O’Neill he is unknown to much of the public – means that he could be critical to credibly conveying the solemn messages which will be necessary as the pandemic escalates.

On Thursday, Mr Swann – a politician who has never been known for a flashy style or a proponent of spin – sombrely laid out a coming surge “of Biblical proportions”.

His statement candidly set out how hospital capacity in Northern Ireland is woefully inadequate – with only 126 critical care beds in all of Northern Ireland, just 1.2% of the 10,600 people may need critical care beds in a worst case scenario.
There are only 139 ventilators – and even by the end of the month, there will only be 179.

At a future point, there will be recrimination as to how we got here. But Mr Swann attempted to shock the public into heeding the radical advice to avoid human contact outside the home and to wash hands regularly, warning the public that their choices over coming days will influence how many people die in the coming weeks.

It is a commentary on both human selfishness and the lack of trust in civil authorities that so many of the public still believe that the situation is being exaggerated and this is simply a wave of a routine winter flu.

If Italy is a guide, some of those people will not ever come to appreciate the gravity of the situation until the bodies are so numerous that the Army has to be called in to help with burials.

It is not normal to see battleground triage decisions as to who can be treated and who will be left to die in developed European countries such as Italy or Spain and level-headed people in Stormont are genuinely fearful about what is coming.

But while the current situation is profoundly serious, it is also important to maintain some perspective.

As a journalist, most of my job involves looking into government from the outside.

However, every year I go to the Public Record Office for the declassification of government files as historical records and get to look out from the inside of Stormont.

From those files emerge stories of scandal, of questionable behaviour and laziness. But one of the reassuring aspects of searching the files is to see how much government prepares for the grim detail of disasters.

The files reveal detailed contingency planning for everything from a societal breakdown after nuclear bomb attacks which sever communications with the outside world to what happens when someone flies into Aldergrove and is found to be contaminated.

Their work involves morbid details which are only ever seen by a small number of civil servants and ministers.

That work continues, with three or four full-time staff employed in Stormont Castle to work on civil contingencies planning. In the good times, few of us want to consider catastrophe.

Four years ago, Keith Jagelman, head of that small team of officials – the civil contingencies policy branch in The Executive Office – gave evidence to the Assembly committee which scrutinises the department. Alongside him that day was Stephen Grimason, then head of the Executive press office. MLAs spent more than 80% of the meeting questioning Mr Grimason on government communication, only coming to civil contingencies at the very end.

When Mr Jagelman mentioned that “we are looking at other risks, such as animal health and human health in the form of pandemic influenza”, no one thought to question him on that.

But such work has been done over many years and updated to learn from global developments, including the swine flu outbreak a decade ago. Their job, one source said, is to work out how the most people could be killed in the shortest period and then attempt to reverse-engineer that scenario so that it could be prevented.

Contingency planning can only ever be a rough framework until the precise nature of the challenge are known. Now officials – and ultimately ministers – have to take those decisions. At the head of the Executive, Arlene Foster and Michelle O’Neill have lurched between looking impressively united and shambolically divided.

Some senior civil servants are frustrated by the time wasted in the last week on arguments between Sinn Féin and the DUP over when to close schools when the simple message of ‘wash your hands and stay at home’ should have been amplified.

On Wednesday, the Executive issued the media with a photo of a meeting of the Civil Contingencies Group NI (CCGNI) – the crisis committee which brings together ministers, senior civil servants and the emergency services at Stormont.

Only those on one side of the table were identifiable but four of those visible played some part in the RHI scandal. That scandal, coming after so many other revelations about Stormont incompetence and misbehaviour has sapped public confidence in much of the machinery of government.

But one former senior Stormont figure familiar with its contingency planning work said that unlike the departments’ routine work, which is often hopelessly compartmentalised, the civil emergency systems break down departmental boundaries and get civil servants working as a team.

Referring to the CCGNI, he said: “It’s like a giant octopus – once you wake it, its tentacles go everywhere. Everybody rolls up their sleeves. Nobody goes home. You’re working with people you know and trust.”

RHI squandered public money, but this crisis is about lives. It is both a threat to the Stormont system – which if it fails in this is likely to face unimaginable public wrath – but also an opportunity.

While it is health staff who will be on the front line attempting to save lives, Stormont can support them by showing that for once, where it matters more than ever, our politicians can unite and our civil servants can work diligently, thereby restoring public faith in their competence but also helping to save lives.