A barrister representing victims of the contaminated blood scandal including Jesmond's Carol Grayson attacked the Government's "absolute lack of candour" in his closing statement to the Infected Blood Inquiry.
Sam Stein KC set out in a moving address - taking place on the final day of the inquiry's hearings - how the Government's "failure to realise that apologies must mean something" was indicative of a failure to understand the importance of restorative justice. The lawyer said: "Restorative justice requires not just the form of an apology, but the sense - to those who are being apologised to - that the apology giver accepts wrongdoing."
Mr Stein also paid tribute to the work of campaigners like Carol and colleagues such as Colette Wintle, Mark Ward and the late Peter Mossman - whose funeral was a year to the day before the inquiry's final hearings. He said without them, the Inquiry itself would never have happened. Later in the day Inquiry counsel Jenni Richards KC repeated this.
