Praise for Machynlleth woman's Covid care home fight

I would like to use this week’s column to praise Covid justice inquiry campaigner, Catherine Griffiths.

Catherine’s determination to find out why so many people died of Covid in care homes in Wales, and to hold the relevant authorities to account, is incredibly impressive and reliably relentless.

Catherine, who lives in Machynlleth, has fought for years for the victims of Covid and their families and friends in a way that I could not.

Catherine and I have never met in person, but we have spoken many times on the phone over the years to cover various stages of the Wales inquiry campaign in the ‘Cambrian News’. We have compared stories of love and loss, and we have cried together as we have lamented the cruel circumstances surrounding the deaths of our loved ones.

Catherine lost her father to Covid in 2022. I lost my grandad to Covid in 2020.

Catherine’s father had been living in a care home in Aberystwyth. My grandad had been living in a care home in England.

Catherine’s father was 86 when he died.

My grandad was 99 and 9 days, which has a nice roundness to it in one way, but is incredibly infuriating in another. My grandad always wanted to be 100 and, but for Covid, I am 100 hundred per cent certain that he would have made it. Sadly, that was not to be, and my grandad died alone, 11 months and a few weeks short of his 100th birthday.

To add further insult to injury, I lived too far away from my grandad to be allowed to travel to his funeral.

We were just a couple of weeks into the first lockdown, and there was no way of getting to the cemetery in England and back for the service without putting other people in danger and incurring a fine. What strange times we lived through! It all feels like a distant dream, or rather a distant nightmare now, doesn’t it?!

Thankfully, an incredible team of staff at a funeral home in Manchester made sure that I received a recording of my grandad’s funeral service - which was attended by just four people. I received a copy of the funeral by email a couple of hours later, and I was even mentioned in the service as someone special who was watching at home. I am incredibly grateful to the funeral home, the man who conducted the service and the person who emailed it me, but watching your war hero grandfather’s funeral 150 miles away from where it took place, two hours after it happened with so few people there, is always going to be incredibly odd, strangely surreal, and deeply unsatisfying.

Devastated by my grandad’s death and confused by the chaos that surrounded us all during the pandemic, I felt angry and hopeless, and I retreated from the world for a year or so.

Catherine felt the same anger a couple of years later when her father’s life was cut short by Covid, but she did not retreat like I did. No, Catherine did the opposite to me. She decided to fight for justice for the victims who died in care homes, to fight for answers for the families and friends of those who died, and to fight for rules and regulations to be put in place to make sure our vulnerable elderly loved ones, and our incredible care home staff, never have to go through such an horrific ordeal ever again.

After Catherine’s dad died of Covid-19 in Hafan y Waun care home in Aberystwyth, she sought out like-minded people to confront the governments of both the UK and Wales for answers about the Covid crisis and the catastrophic effect it had on some of our most vulnerable citizens who found themselves trapped in care homes as Covid spread through them.

Catherine became a member of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru and, together with other members of the group, she has filed reports, asked questions, gathered evidence and confronted those in charge at the time of the pandemic to find out what went wrong with care homes during the pandemic.

Years later, Catherine and her fellow campaigners are still campaigning for justice. They say they are angry, devastated and tired of having to fight for answers, but fight on they do.

Catherine’s inspiration is her father, RAF Group Captain Harold Griffiths, who was originally from Dinas-Mawddwy in Gwynedd.

In later life, Mr Griffiths moved to Aberystwyth to be closer to his daughter Catherine, who lives in Machynlleth, and set up home at Hafan y Waun care home. Sadly, the decision to move there proved fatal and the rest, as they say, is history.

But making sure that she is on the right side of history, and making sure that she is able to give a voice to the victims of care home acquired Covid like her father, is Catherine. She has put me to shame, and I am not afraid to admit it. She has fought when I and many others like me, could not. Long may she continue!