The amount of space allocated in our social memory to historical events is strangely uneven. Pandemics seem more than usually susceptible to social forgetting, particularly if we look at the so-called Spanish flu.
It had an almost unimaginable death toll of somewhere between 50 and 100 million people, mostly young people between the ages of 25-35. Somewhere between two and five in every 100 people died.
In Ireland, 23,000 people died. It should hold an outsize space in our recollection, yet the opposite is true. Nor is our amnesia fully explained by the pandemic being overshadowed by the first World War, or in Ireland also by the consequences of the Rising.
The tumultuous few years of the Covid-19 pandemic are already receding from our social memory, becoming blurry and surreal. But those whose loved ones died far from human touch or love, and those who are still traumatised by battling through it as frontline workers, have not forgotten.
This makes the inadequacy of the proposed Covid-19 evaluation even more disappointing. It is not sufficient to say that “mistakes were made”, a phrase that carefully removes agency from those who made them. Nor is it right to demonise those who were working under intense stress, facing a mysterious illness about which little was initially known, not even the vectors of infection.
Politicians have said that they do not want this to be an exercise in scapegoating. And yet historical inquiries into our industrial schools were just that, with the church painted as a parasitic enemy of all progress, which forced Irish people to forget their common decency. The idea that people might have freely embraced their faith and even seen it as a source of hope in dark times in Irish history disappeared.
The church to which I belong deserved scrutiny and strong condemnation for how it ran industrial schools. But it was not some kind of malign outside agency. It was ourselves. Our families willingly and even proudly encouraged sons to become priests and brothers and daughters to become religious sisters. People such as Derek Scally, who have asked about the fathers of the babies whose remains were found under the old Bon Secours home in Tuam, are beginning to break down the simplistic narrative that it was somehow forces beyond ourselves that were solely responsible.
Similarly, it is important to examine how the recent pandemic exposed and exacerbated fault lines and flaws present in Irish society. Our health system was already overstretched and unprepared. Those who suffered the most and died in the largest numbers were elderly people in nursing homes. Important work has been done to improve conditions in nursing homes, not least due to the Covid-19 Nursing Homes Expert Panel. So much more needs to be done.
The damage done to vulnerable adolescents and children during hard lockdowns will take decades to repair
Why do we warehouse our elderly? Why do we speak of wasted lives when younger people end up in these centres, but not of wasted lives when the elderly who could be supported at home end up in them? The Government instructed nursing homes that had implemented visitor restrictions to open up again. It had plans to deploy thousands of people from acute hospitals into nursing homes without adequate testing or protections.
By May 2020, eight weeks into lockdown, realising the social and psychological impact of a hard lockdown on people in nursing homes, the Netherlands instituted a dedicated visitor scheme. It allowed people to have at least one visitor a week under strict conditions. Too many people died alone in Ireland.
There were similar blind spots regarding religion and education. Numerous studies show the benefits of religious faith to mental health, including the most recent TILDA study, which showed that gathering for religious services decreases both loneliness and wishing to die among the elderly. We locked down harder, longer and more strictly than anywhere else in Europe when it came to religion, and reopening churches came somewhere in importance after hair salons in government thinking.
The damage done to vulnerable adolescents and children during hard lockdowns will take decades to repair. But when schools reopened, they were given limited financial assistance and then left to get on with it in miserable conditions. Their reward, like the reward given to healthcare staff, was to have their efforts rapidly forgotten.
Donncha O’Connell has outlined the inadequacies of the proposed evaluation chaired by Anne Scott, describing it in these pages as “an ill-defined inquisitorial framework without powers”.
It is too late in the life of this Government to remedy that brief. However, it should become an issue on the doorsteps to remind the incoming government that the people need, want and deserve a proper accounting both of the successes and failures of the handling of the pandemic.
The Spanish flu left intergenerational trauma in its wake, ably recorded in Ireland in important work by Dr Ida Milne and Dr Patricia Marsh. It is important that the story of Covid-19, and in particular the work of women who bore the brunt of healthcare, juggled homeschooling and paid work, went through labour alone, endured partner violence and greater mental distress, is told in full. Forgetfulness and fudging are both unforgivable responses.