Just days before DUP councillor Paul Hamill caught Covid, he posted photographs on Facebook of a family holiday in Ballycastle.
It’s typical Irish weather requiring raincoats and woolly hats, but happiness radiates from the pictures. Dunluce Castle is still spectacular on a dismal day, and Paul’s daughters enjoy pony trekking.
Today, Grace and Sarah are without their father, and Covid has robbed Ruth of her husband.
Paul regularly retweeted anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown material. It seemed to preoccupy him. He wasn’t worried about coronavirus.
In March, he tweeted that he’d taken an online University of Oxford risk assessment. “This screenshot is my risk of dying from Covid, 0.0036%,” he wrote. “You can check your risk in the link below.”
Last month, Paul’s Twitter was chock-a-block with retweets including claims the vaccine causes the virus; suggesting anti-worming drug ivermectin as an alternative Covid treatment; and showing Italians burning their proof of vaccination passes.
From August 23, there’s no more Twitter activity from Paul. He had been on a ventilator before he died on Tuesday in Antrim Hospital. He was buried on Friday after a service in Belfast City Mission in Rathcoole. I interviewed Paul in 2018 when he was mayor of Antrim and Newtownabbey.
He was about to give an address in Irish at a gathering for language groups and schoolchildren, and wanted to explain his thinking.
He was “mayor for all the people”, he said. A nationalist Irish-speaking friend had helped him learn a few sentences and he’d also sought assistance from a teacher at an Irish school on his pronunciation. We laughed hard at how he still had a fair bit of work to do in that regard.
Paul was a lovely, friendly guy with a great sense of humour. The affection he inspired was clear in the outpouring of grief after his death.
He was “an absolute legend”, said one woman who added: “He asked how you were, and he wanted to hear because he cared.”
Important words were also spoken by virologist Dr Conall McCaughey. He said it was vital that deaths like Paul’s “make people reassess their attitudes to vaccines”.
Politicians have a duty to uphold public health messaging in word and deed. The statistics must be continually driven home: of those in ICU wards with Covid, 72% are unvaccinated, 8% have had one dose and 20% have had two.
The Department of Health figures show that while unvaccinated people make up less than 12% of the adult population, they account for 72% of people in ICU.
Adults who haven’t received two jabs are five times as likely to be admitted to hospital and 10 times as likely to be admitted to ICU than those fully vaccinated.
People must be armed with solid information so they disregard the falsehoods and nonsense on social media. Journalists also have a duty to call out fake news as William Crawley and his Talkback team have been routinely doing on Radio Ulster.
On Wednesday, there was an incredibly moving interview on The Nolan Show.
Kevin McAllister told Stephen how his 34-year-old daughter Sammie-Jo — who had no underlying health conditions — and her mother Heather had died of Covid.
Both care workers were unvaccinated. “I have to bury my firstborn, my best friend, my daughter, and I can’t get it out of my mind why she didn’t take it,” Kevin said.
“It will haunt me for the rest of my life.” Sammie-Jo leaves behind four children under 11.
Paul Hamill’s posts and pictures of his beautiful family regularly popped up on my Facebook feed.
The girls standing shyly with their dad as he wore his mayoral chain; in front of the Ferris wheel at a funfair; Paul joining in beauty treatment with a pink face mask; then proudly sporting a ‘Dad Of Girls #Outnumbered’ T-shirt in June.
The photos always made me feel guilty that I did nowhere near enough with my own daughters.
Paul was a father who gave so much to his beloved family — and tragically still had so much more to give.