Tony O’Brien: High levels of Covid are a policy failure, but refusing to act is a leadership failure

The reintroduction of a partial mask mandate seems a simple and proportionate response to the situation we are now in

Health Minister Stephen Donnelly reportedly told his party colleagues last week that the level of Covid infection was now so out of control that the scale of measures required to tackle it would be too significant, so it was simply not possible to do anything. Picture: PA