Mr. Mervyn Taylor:

It was considerable. I said on "Drive Time" before that one of my abiding memories of this crisis has been a sense of phones not being answered when a place went into crisis. It is important to say that in Deputy Butler's own area, in the south east, they got away relatively lightly. It was the north-east quadrant from Dublin across to Mullingar and up to Cavan that was very badly hit. In that area, there were nights one would put one's head in one's hands. There were people who were despairing. They could not get through because the staffing situation was so difficult. The nursing homes were really stuck for staff. Some places were down to absolute skeleton staff until the cavalry came. The fact of the matter is that they needed support. People were literally worn out. I think of one woman in particular who had a dying husband and a son who had lived in the same nursing home and had gone into a hospital and died. People were literally worn out and we were almost trying to pick up the phone calls for them because they were running out of energy. That is one of the key things. It sounds like it has nothing to do with clinical care but one of the most important things was the lack of ability to answer the phones. To think of a nursing home with 50 people in it, that is at least 50 families all trying to get through, and there is nobody able to answer the phone. All sorts of stories were magnified; that is one of the problems. It is about trying to separate fact from fiction in these situations. We heard of places where there were all sorts of allegations about numbers of deaths which were subsequently not true.