(London) Singer Van Morrison is being sued for defamation by Northern Ireland’s Secretary of State for Health Robin Swann, whose anti-COVID-19 health policy he sharply criticized, going so far as to declare that the latter was ” very dangerous “.
According to the weekly Sunday Life, who reported the case on Sunday, the lawsuits relate in particular to a high-profile incident that took place in June 2021, when the creator of Gloria and Brown-eyed girl chanted on stage at the Hotel Arena in Belfast: “Robin Swann is very dangerous”.
He was speaking after the last minute cancellation, due to COVID-19 restrictions, of a concert he was scheduled to attend.
The video of this speech had gone viral.
The lawsuits also relate to two subsequent incidents: an interview in which the singer had called Mr. Swann a “crook” and the uploading of a song in which he addresses the incident at the Hotel Arena, and describes as again the minister of “dangerous”.
“Lawsuits have been brought against Van Morrison,” Swann’s lawyer Paul Tweed told the Sunday Life. “We are targeting a trial in February. ”
In January 2021, the 76-year-old Belfast-born singer threatened to take legal action against the ban on music concerts in bars in Northern Ireland – which like every British nation sets its own health policy vis-à-vis the pandemic – claiming that it was not based on “any scientific or medical evidence”.
In August 2020, he had already created controversy by denouncing the “pseudoscience” which, according to him, surrounds the coronavirus.
The following month, he announced the release of three songs in which he denounces confinement as liberticide and affirms that scientists “invent twisted facts” to justify these restrictions which “enslave” the population.
In a magazine interview Rolling Stone, Robin Swann had considered that these songs were “bizarre and irresponsible”, affirming that they were “really dangerous” because they brought “a great comfort to the partisans of the theory of the conspiracy”.