National day of mourning needed to ‘mark pandemic deaths’

A national day of mourning to remember all those who died – whether of Covid-19 or not – during the pandemic is needed to help those grieve who could not attend funerals, the Minister of State for Mental Health has said.

Fianna Fáil's Mary Butler addressed the Oireachtas sub-committee on mental health. She said older people especially had been harshly affected by not being able to attend funerals.

She said her aunt had died, aged 89, on April 1st, 2020, when older people were being told to cocoon.

“She had eight siblings all close in age to her and none of them were able to attend the funeral . . . that has been extremely traumatic for people,” she said. “We do need a national day of mourning or . . . commemoration, something to remember all those who died in the last 18 months . . . this has been really, really challenging . . . because they couldn’t have a normal funeral.”

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John Lahart (FF) said people had suffered "multiple losses" including of jobs, health and loved ones. A national day of commemoration would be "a big task", but necessary.

Though the 1918 Spanish flu had had an enormous impact on Ireland it had been lost from the national consciousness because it was never commemorated, unlike such events as the War of Independence, first World War One and the Civil War.

“Certainly my generation had no sense that the Spanish flu had an impact at all . . . we lost all sense of it because we never commemorated it, it was never mentioned, it was put away. But we can’t put Covid away. It is something we need to . . . ensure we don’t lose it from our public consciousness,” he said.

Eating disorders

Gino Kenny (People Before Profit-Solidarity), noting a "major increase" in eating disorders since March last year, asked what was being done to recruit specialist clinicians. The Minister replied that she was "frustrated" at how long it took to recruit specialists in the Health Service Executive – up to 50 weeks from the point of posts being advertised.

“Close to 487 young people were admitted last year with an eating disorder, especially young teenagers. It’s a very worrying trend we are seeing at the moment,” she said. The national clinical programme for eating disorders, though it began in 2018, was not funded in 2019 and 2020. She said she had “reinstated” funding of €3.94 million this year.

While the programme had a target of 16 eating disorder teams countrywide, just three were up and running and three more would be by the end of the year, said the Minister.