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

I am delighted to have the opportunity to contribute to this debate, and I commend the Minister on the task he has been given to undertake and deliver on in the most trying and challenging of times. The Minister is doing a fine job. He has the best wishes of this side of the House and, I hope, the other side of the House. The Minister is in the position at a unique time in history when we are faced with a pandemic for the first time in a century. That is quite a burden and responsibility to deal with. He is entitled to the support of his peers and he certainly has it.

I want to focus on one facet of this plan, because I know some of my colleagues have dwelt on the different aspects of the Roadmap for Living with Covid-19. The strategy has much to recommend it and there is much to read in it. Clearly, there has been much thought and planning and an awareness of the impact that phase one of Covid-19 had on people. There has been a huge amount of learning and I want to come back to one specific aspect of that.

In a previous professional chapter in my own life I practised as a psychotherapist and I took a particular interest in the literature and research around loss. Generally speaking, the public - I hope I am not underestimating them - tend to associate loss and grieving with the loss of a loved one. The literature, however, tells us that we can go through the same stages of grieving, if perhaps not so acutely, when we lose many other different things that we take for granted in life. That can include loss of health, loss of status, loss of routine, loss of friendships, loss of work colleagues, loss of work, loss of business, loss of a partner present during labour and loss of having a partner present during pregnancy-related appointments.

It can include loss of hugs, loss of granny, loss of granddad, loss of work colleagues and loss of joy. My sister sent me a photograph on WhatsApp recently of myself and herself and her husband outside Mulligan's this time last year celebrating the drawn all-Ireland game and the picture really hit me right between the eyes. What I saw in one little moment encapsulated what has been taken away from us. There we were with not a care in the world drinking our pints and the people around us very happy, and all of that has been robbed of us. In the literature, they tend to say, generally speaking, that there are five stages in grieving a loss. The most underestimated response to loss is anger when people do not get to express their feelings around the loss that they have just experienced. I have elucidated just a few of those kind of losses. We could have a much longer list than that. As a parliament and as a society, we need to watch out for anger. There is a significant amount of unexpressed anger in society at present.

I am particularly taken with the emphasis and the research work done. I am looking forward to what the Minister will produce in practical terms because there is a good roadmap in, I think, section 6 on resilience and community. I am taken with the work that SpunOut has done, particularly with the generation aged 16 to 25. As Dr. Tony Bates said in an article in The Irish Timesthis morning, people in this age group have suffered more than most because it is the time when they develop primarily through contact and interactions with their peer group and that has been denied to them. Do we begrudge them when they break out of the rules a little? I would side with Dr. Bates on this. We need to practise the rules but we need to be human too and resist pointing the finger.

We need to give people hope. How does one give people hope? Generally, when we get bad news, we learn to live with it, cope with it, absorb it, internalise it, digest it, grieve the consequences of it and move on. There is no moving on with this pandemic because we do not know when it will go. This means that there will be continued losses carried on by society. I often think of how useful Dr. Maureen Gaffney's morning piece with the late Gay Byrne on the radio used to be years ago. She psychologically analysed the nation and dealt with its problems. I know that much of this stuff happens on social media and it is really positive. I think the Government needs to step into this space. There is one useful thing we could do. It is not for the Minister; it is for the Cabinet. We need to do something special for people this Christmas, such as give city and county councils significant budgets for fantastic public lighting displays that people can go out safely and admire. We need to put some thought into this. It will be a Christmas like no other and the State needs to step in.

I refer to all the messages people are receiving from the State. I looked at the make-up of NPHET this morning. It is such a fine body of people, generally from a medical background. I hope I am not being harsh on them when I say that the people who have a psychological, mental health or well-being background are on the administrative side rather than on the medical side. In Ireland, we tend to separate physical and mental health from each other instead of looking at them as one integrated piece. We have a big task as a Government on the mental health and well-being piece. People across society, even people who have been virtually unaffected by the virus, have suffered losses. It could be that they cannot go to see their son or daughter playing the local sport. That is a loss. People are angry about that. The Government needs to acknowledge that. In our messaging, we need to find a way to give people hope. Hope has been missing from much of the messaging coming from the Government. We need to devise a way to give people something to cling on to or hope for, whether it is the promise of a great festival the likes of which has never been seen in the country or whether it is devising ways of memorialising those people who have been lost to Covid, even now at distance in our churches, in our places of worship or in a humanistic way.

There is much good. I am looking forward to the outworkings of the SpunOut investigation into the needs of younger people, but this is a cross-society requirement. In bringing this back to his Cabinet colleagues, the Minister should watch out for anger, which is the most underestimated response to loss.

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