Irish Examiner view: Questions on Covid need full answers

Death rates may represent a systemic failure against which we need to prepare ourselves in the future

A cohesive, full, and multi-agency dialogue over the manner in which this country managed its response to the pandemic is needed.

What just happened?

We have consistently called for a cohesive, full, and multi-agency dialogue over the manner in which this country managed its response to the pandemic, and we will continue to do so until some meaningful proposals emerge.

At the weekend, our political editor posed a series of questions that might justifiably form part of any official investigation. It was within a column reflecting his personal views and judgements after two years covering what can rightly be called the biggest public health crisis in memory.

He didn’t suggest that his list of issues was comprehensive. 

However, remarkably, there has not been any attempt by the Government and its servants (by which we mean our public servants) to structure terms of reference for the scrutiny of those matters that citizens and taxpayers would like to be answered, if only to ensure that we have learned our lessons properly and will be better prepared next time.

“Covid-19 is towards the upper end [the most bearable] of the kind of epidemic that humanity has had to cope with from the beginning of time,” according to Jonathan Sumption, one of Britain’s most senior judges and a pre-eminent historian. 

He is recognised to be the authority on the pan-European 100 Years War. This century-long conflict included the Black Death of 1347 to 1351, which killed nearly 50% of the French population and some 33% of those in England.

Mr Sumption argues that the various lockdowns in Britain were brutal, and unprecedented, in prohibiting the most basic of human interactions. Yet our own restrictions in Ireland were even more prohibitive.

Let us just consider one aspect of Ireland’s management of the coronavirus — the challenges that arose very early in care homes. These institutions form a parallel provision to hospitals and the State is far from alone in miscalculating what assistance they needed to protect them.

This example of what might happen without a properly constituted inquiry is both topical and worrying. 

The Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa), which reviews and audits health provision, has delivered heavily redacted reports into Covid deaths at three nursing homes — Carechoice, Ballynoe, Co Cork; Cahercalla Community Hospital, Co Clare; and Tara Winthrop Private Clinic, Co Dublin.

Some of the information in the reports has come into the public realm through Freedom of Information (FoI) requests. 

However, none of the relatives of those who died have seen the content, which was delivered to Mary Butler, junior minister for mental health and older people.

Allegations of abuse and neglect

She said last summer that she planned to report any “potentially criminal” allegations about abuse and neglect in nursing homes to gardaí, and vowed to “leave no stone unturned”. 

The minister has previously let it be known that she does not favour a lengthy inquiry, of the kind that was instituted into the mother and baby homes, and would prefer something similar to the scoping inquiry carried out by Gabriel Scally into the CervicalCheck programme.

Setting aside that one reason the mother and baby homes inquiry was drawn out was because of mounting frustrations about whether information previously provided was comprehensive, there are reasons to believe that full candour in such hearings requires the encouragement of formality and rules of evidence. 

Among the redactions in the Hiqa report is the numbers of deaths recorded at one of the nursing homes. These have been excised because FoI allows exemptions for “commercially sensitive information”.

Death rates are a cause for mourning and they may represent a systemic failure against which we need to prepare ourselves in the future. One thing they are not is “commercially sensitive information”. Any future inquiry, which has to include residential centres, must be more transparent.

More than 2,000 nursing home residents died during the pandemic and relatives’ access was strictly controlled. There has to be a full hearing, and understanding, of what took place if there is to be any prospect of closure. This subject needs to reach the top of the in-tray marked ‘Action Today’.