Mr. Seán Moynihan:

ALONE has campaigned and worked to combat loneliness for several years. The pandemic gave people a real insight into and understanding of loneliness. Evidence based on research indicates that loneliness will shorten a person's life and their physical and mental health. That evidence has existed for many years across many meta studies, etc. The reality is that large number of people did not quite understand the effects of loneliness previously. Unfortunately, the pandemic expanded the rate of loneliness where people who had never been lonely all of a sudden ended up in a world where they were lonely. For us, combating loneliness features in three Government strategies. There is a commitment in the programme for Government to produce strategies to combat loneliness. We lead the loneliness task force and a research network. We want to produce evidence-based proposals for the Government. ALONE has really struggled post pandemic to keep up with the number of older people reaching out to us. The Senator's observation that some people have never re-emerged is probably correct. The evidence from the Institute of Public Health and from our quarterly reports show two things, namely that large numbers of people are coming to us and that many are struggling.