Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Everybody agrees that the pandemic bore down hardest on people living in nursing homes. Unfortunately, we lost a great number of people in nursing homes as a result of Covid.

I suppose what was so disappointing about what was outlined last night is that was during the third wave of Covid, we had the vaccine in place, we had routine testing every two weeks and we had put in place infection prevention and control measures. I have met those families from Ballynoe and I know how distressed and upset they are, but it was a very difficult situation. At that time, all over Ireland we had unprecedented numbers. I remember at the time we had more than 300 nursing homes with a Covid outbreak. We had outbreaks across all our acute hospitals and we simply did not have enough staff.

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