Robin Swann versus Van Morrison is just a sideshow in Covid debate – It would be really Dangerous not to learn from our lockdown mistakes

You don’t have to be a genius to work out what the song is about.

In September 2020, in what is surely one of the weirdest footnotes to the pandemic, Health Minister Robin Swann wrote an article for Rolling Stone, the once-hip American magazine.

Why? Well, he was very annoyed about Van Morrison’s anti-lockdown songs.

Condemning Sir Van’s musical protest as “bizarre”, “irresponsible” and, er, “dangerous”, Mr Swann said it “could encourage people not to take coronavirus seriously”.

The ‘D’ word came up again in the summer of 2021, when four gigs that Van Morrison was due to perform at the Europa Hotel were cancelled at the last moment on Covid-related safety grounds.

Mr Morrison took to the stage and said: “Robin Swann has all the power. So I say Robin Swann is very dangerous.” He repeated the words in a loud, angry chant, which sent the Northern Ireland political and media establishment into a flurry of outrage.

Aggressive, menacing, disgusting: these were just some of the reactions. Someone even announced that they weren’t going to play Van’s songs any more. Their loss, I guess.

Afterwards, Van Morrison released a video on his YouTube channel, trying to explain himself. He said he considered Robin Swann to be dangerous because “he has too much control over people’s lives”.

He added that he had asked Mr Swann for scientific evidence that live music was involved in transmitting the virus, but no evidence had ever been produced.

Mr Swann’s reaction to being called dangerous was to launch legal proceedings against Sir Van, suing him for libel.

So that’s where we are now. Let’s leave it for the courts to decide, shall we?

What is indisputable is that the lockdown restrictions enacted by Stormont, and by many governments around the world, caused terrible collateral damage to people’s lives.

We were told repeatedly that these measures were necessary, vital, and that many more lives would have been lost without them.

However, new figures from the World Health Organisation (WHO), estimating excess deaths during the pandemic, call this official narrative into serious doubt.

Sweden, for instance, was widely vilified for continuing with its established pandemic plan, instead of following the rest of the world into the untried experiment of legally-enforced lockdown.

The country was treated as a deadly pariah state, heedlessly sacrificing its own citizens.

It became, quite literally, unsayable. I remember trying to talk about Sweden’s approach during a radio debate and being instantly shut down by the host. Such was the fevered climate of censorship, I was not even allowed to mention the country on air.

Now Sweden’s strategy appears to have been vindicated. The WHO report reveals that between January 2020 and January 2022, Sweden had some of the lowest excess-death rates in the whole of the EU: half that of the UK, Spain or Germany.

Yes, even top-of-the-class Germany. The German government supposedly schooled the world in pandemic management: locking down promptly, bringing in vaccine passports and excluding the unvaccinated from society.

Yet the WHO figures show that Germany suffered more excess deaths per capita than here in the bungling, mismanaged, PPE-lacking UK.

Look, I know we’re all sick and tired of thinking about Covid. We just want to forget about it and move on with our lives, pretending that those nightmare years never happened.

But simply clinging to the unexamined belief that lockdowns were essential, and blocking our ears to inconvenient information which may contradict this narrative, cannot be an option.

The truth matters.

“Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them. Those who do not know history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them.”

This resonant warning, from the philosopher George Santayana, is often applied to the Troubles, and the risk of sliding back into violence through blinkered ignorance of the past.

Yet it could just as easily be applied to the pandemic.

If we don’t determine the genuine facts of the matter, what worked and what didn’t, then we could find ourselves in the same horrific place all over again.

And that, in my view, is where the real danger lies.