Ben Lowry: For four years Sinn Fein faced little real pressure over the Bobby Storey IRA funeral mass covid breach, so it is little wonder they felt no need to say sorry

It is such an illustration of the gentle way in which SF’s double standards are treated in NI that it is worth quoting at length.

She said that "…the approach of the Tory government to the pandemic was not consistent with the approach taken by the Executive … we at the start were largely aligned with the UK … [but] we did adopt a more localised response which responded to the realities of the pandemic in the North. The approach to the pandemic is in many ways, epitomised by the evidence which has emerged of the partying in No. 10 Downing Street, in breach of the regulations introduced to protect the public from the Pandemic. Staff parties ... did not occur in our local context and would frankly, have been unthinkable.”

It is as if Private Eye made up this passage, as a rich satire on a party that was sanctimonious from the outset of the coronavirus, then engaged in perhaps the first very serious breach of lockdown in the UK after it was imposed in March of that year, 2020, by being at the helm of the huge IRA funeral for Bobby Storey.

SF’s shrill sanctimony had included its abandonment of an agreed cross-party policy to keep open schools in March, in what became an obsessive goal for the party – to co-ordinate an all Ireland covid response. Catholic schools in NI began to ignore the Education Department and just closed. John O’Dowd called Boris Johnson’s government a “shire of bastards” who were courting disaster.

From early in lockdown republican funerals breached lockdown but nothing on the scale of the Storey show of strength in June 2020, in which thousands of spectators came on to the streets. A cowardly PSNI shuttled back and forth like poodles to liaise with republicans to facilitate this outrage – I say cowardly because for months the police had been willing to fine easy targets like elderly women who strayed beyond suggested lockdown limits of travel to walk in the countryside.

Then Belfast City Council closed Roselawn to give exclusive treatment to the terrorist Bobby Storey and his supporters and loved ones.

And then, after this grievous insult to the thousands of families who, minus a handful of paramilitary thugs, had all obeyed swingeing restrictions on the size and formats of funerals, a series of investigations into the Bobby Storey saga effectively found it was all a bit unfortunate but no-one was to blame.

Remember also how Stormont MLAs and much of the media including the BBC was slow to react to the Storey mass covid breach but were overtaken by an outraged public.

All of this was had enough. The consider what happened next. Sinn Fein returned to sanctimony and bossiness over lockdown and wanted to extend it beyond its already excessive duration in Northern Ireland. Some funeral restrictions were still in place almost two years later, in early 2022 when my mum died (about 40,000 people in NI died in those two years, mostly not of covid).

On Tuesday Ms O’Neill denied the inquiry KC’s suggestion that she was blaming everyone else. Then she issued her heartfelt ‘apology’.

When this apology was issued four years late, and – conveniently – at the very first point at which she was properly grilled about it, Ms O’Neill was asked by the chair if she had not been able to foresee the hurt it would cause. No, she said.

The woman who, as deputy first minister, wanted tighter, faster restrictions somehow did not see that other people who had dutifully accepted brutal funeral restrictions might recoil from her not only being at the front of the massive Storey procession but recoil from her saying that she would “never apologise for going to the funeral of a friend”.

On Talkback on Tuesday I expressed surprise that it took 30 minutes to get to me, the first person to say on the panel that the grilling of O’Neill was the big story of the day, indeed the whole inquiry so far.

By the next day it had fallen down to seventh on the BBC website (although Stephen Nolan once again gave the scandal some of the coverage it deserved, with an hour and a half in the morning and a TV show that night.

Overall though the Storey funeral never got the scrutiny or sanction it should have done and didn’t even this week, apart from a a brief burst of attention.

No wonder Sinn Fein thinks it can operate by different rules.