John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have a final question on Covid, to which Deputies Ward and Hourigan referred. I referred previously, albeit in a different context, to a great book written by Dr. Ida Milne on the history of the Spanish flu in Ireland. One of her conclusions, which she laments, is that the Spanish flu occurred in a period of revolution towards the end of the First World War and people did not want to know or talk too about it much. As such, we forgot about it as a society and, as Dr. Milne wrote, did not memorialise it. Memorials take many different manifestations.

I sense an appetite in Ireland to try to move on from Covid very quickly. It looks as though we could have more than another pandemic in our lifetime and we are not completely free of this one.

All Deputies heard heartbreaking, heart-wrenching and awful stories about dads or partners waiting in a car outside the prenatal clinic and not being present at labour. What have we learned? Where can we learn about that? The papers have not been written about this yet. This is not about looking for headlines to point the finger of blame but, if in ten years' we had another pandemic that necessitated interventions such as those we have just had, what could our prenatal and postnatal care system have learned? Was the response proportionate in hindsight? How would we do it again? Part of that paper, whenever it is written, is about acknowledging the awful trauma experienced by mothers and their partners and, equally, the trauma of the nurses and nurse managers who had to say "We are sorry". I am sure they put up with considerable abuse and trauma.