GROWING CLAMOUR TO LIFT LIMIT ON FUNERALS
Hospice Foundation, funeral directors AND some clergy join calls to allow more than ten mourners
PRESSURE is mounting on the Government to lift heartbreaking funeral restrictions that continue to be imposed on grieving families.
Funeral directors, hospice chiefs and members of the clergy now make up a strong triumvirate who have joined the chorus of calls demanding that the tenperson attendance rule for
funerals be, at the least, eased.
The Irish Hospice Foundation has written to the Department of Health urging it to allow more mourners to attend services after an independent survey found that such a move has wide public support.
Agreeing with the push for leniency
on restrictions for mourners is Patrick Hickey, director at McNally’s Funerals and Memorials in Balbriggan, Dublin, who said large churches should be allowed to have 30 or 40 people if safeguards are put in place.
Similarly, Fr John Byrne, parish priest of Portlaoise, Co. Laois, said families are being put in an impossible situation by the ten-mourner limit, where one person must decide who can attend and who can’t.
‘No family should be put in that situation, especially when social distancing can be accommodated,’ he said.
Fr Byrne wants the strictures eased, pointing out that allowable attendance for funeral services should be based on the size of the church. ‘Our parish church here can hold 1,600 people, whereas our small rural churches can hold nothing like that, so there is no great rationale to setting the same limit on every church,’ he said.
The Irish Hospice Foundation, which helps terminally ill people and their families, has said there is a rising public impatience with the situation.
‘Grandchildren can’t go to funerals. People want to know what the next phase is, so we’ve
‘People want to know’
written to the Department of Health with our own recommendations,’ said IHF chief executive Sharon Foley.
‘The feedback we are getting from families is that it is now very, very hard on them. The other thing we are hearing is that people want access to loved ones at the end of life. Nobody should die alone.’
Ms Foley said Ireland is now moving into a steady phase and there is a need for balance.
A poll released this week by the market research company, Behaviour & Attitudes, carried out on behalf of the IHF, found that 68% of people felt that the virus had made people rethink how society deals with death.
The foundation released a seven-point policy document the same day which said an end-of-life service should be set up in nursing homes and that people should be allowed to die in their homes or their place of preference. It also makes suggestions for the sensitive handling of deaths, including allowing for larger funerals and allowing families to see dying people.
The document has been sent to all parties and the Oireachtas coronavirus committee.
Jane Carrigan told the Irish Daily Mail that there were just seven mourners at the funeral of her aunt, Rose Hegarty, who died of coronavirus last month.
Rose requested there be a guitarist and singer at the funeral. After the priest was added, this left room for only seven mourners in the church, even though many more wanted to attend.
Funeral director Patrick Hickey said it’s getting hard to do marshal the services and reported that more and more people are showing up at churches and cemeteries to pay their respects.
He also agreed strongly with the IHF’s call for people to be allowed be with loved ones in their final moments, even if the dying person has Covid-19.
‘It’s very, very hard to get your head around why families won’t be able to say a last goodbye and conditions like that need to be looked at,’ he said.
He said that if people can
‘We have stewards’
show up in big numbers – far larger than ten – at Aldi or hardware stores, they should be allowed into churches in which there is hand sanitiser and stewards to guide them in one door and out another.
Backing the push for reforming the rules, Fr Byrne asked: ‘Could there not be an accommodation worked out according to the size of the church?’