Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank all of our witnesses not just for their time today but for the ongoing work they have been doing over the past few months on what is the biggest public health crisis the country has ever faced. This State has done incredible work in areas such as getting the hospitals ready for the surge. Our clinicians have done extraordinary work. The engagement with the public has been fantastic. The one area where we probably have not fared well is on nursing homes and because that is the subject matter of the session today, I want to focus on that.

We have had 1,710 fatalities to date from Covid-19. Our fatality rate is high by international and European standards. I have put that to various people previously and the answer has always been that we are not comparing like for like because we have a very good reporting regime. However, new analysis in The Sunday Business Postby Susan Mitchell and Rachel Lavin deals with that. It looks at excess deaths over the past five years and has been lauded by statisticians as robust analysis. We now have comparable data on Ireland's Covid-19 fatality rate versus that of other European countries and what it shows is what the other data showed as well. We have the eighth highest fatality rate in Europe. Many people have said that given that we are an island and therefore have less cross-border traffic than mainland European countries, and that we are on the western edge of Europe and therefore we had more time, we would have expected to be in the lower end of fatalities in Europe, but we are not. We are in the higher end; we are in the top third. If we had had the same level of fatalities as countries like Germany, Austria, Finland, Denmark and many others, instead of having 1,700 fatalities we would be down around 500, and if we were in the bottom third we would be lower again.

The reality is that two in every three fatalities have come from long-term residential settings in Ireland and the vast majority of those are from nursing homes. Have the witnesses and the organisations they lead - the Department and the HSE - looked at what those other countries did because they have a fraction of the fatality rate that we have and a fraction of our fatality rate in nursing homes? It is plausible that they took actions that we should know about that we did not do and from which we should be learning because we could be looking at a second wave. God knows, we could be looking at more than a second wave. Has the State looked at what the countries with much lower fatality rates did to protect their nursing homes? Are there actions we can take in the future? Is there anything we have learned from that and anything we are putting in place to improve our ongoing response?