PROF. BILL POWER: LESSONS TO BE LEARNT FROM SPANISH FLU
PUBS, shops and cinemas were closed. Country people were afraid to go into towns and villages in case they’d catch it. People died in large numbers.
These were features of the Spanish Influenza when it struck North Cork in October 1918.
Newspaper coverage of the impact of that virus, which may have killed upwards of 35,000 people in Ireland, was limited compared to the wall-to-wall media coverage of the impact of Coronavirus.
By mid-December 1918, people were lulled into thinking that the danger had passed.
Nothing could have been further than the truth.
Although pandemics have occurred at intervals throughout history, few people in Ireland were even aware of the 1918 influenza pandemic until COVID-19 closed down the country last March.
Last year, I began researching the impact of Spanish Flu on North Cork and was continuing my research in January when news of the Coronavirus started to get media attention.
I recall people saying at the time that nothing like this had ever happened before, but it had, and it was only a hundred years ago.
Between 1918 and the end of 1919, 226 of the 1,100 people who died in the Fermoy poor law union died from influenza/ pneumonia. After old age, it was the main cause of death in the area between 1918 and 1919.
The Fermoy Union covered the parishes including Mitchelstown, Kilworth, Fermoy, Castlelyons, Rathcormac, Conna, Ballyhooly, Castletownroche, Killavullen, Glanworth, Kildorrery, Ballylanders and Galbally.
To deal with the situation, the guardians of the Fermoy Union – who were responsible for healthcare in the area – and Fermoy Urban Council ordered the closure of all places of public entertainment.
They did not go as far as ordering the closure of shops, but many shops closed anyway because their owners and staff got sick and they couldn’t keep their doors open.
The hospitals in the military barracks in Fermoy and Buttevant suffered several losses from flu, particularly at the end of October and through to December 1918.
In at least one case in Fermoy, a business was wiped out by the consequences of the flu. Michael Kelleher of Bank Street (46), died on October 22, 1918 and his much younger wife, Margaret, died two days later.
One of the problems about surviving records is that they do not distinguish between pneumonia, influenzas and the Spanish Flu. Neither did newspapers carry reports of the number of people dying each day. To compile such figures in an age before computers and telecommunications would have been almost an impossibility in 1918.
However, my best guess is that up to 150 people died of Spanish Flu in the Fermoy-Mitchelstown area between 1918 and 1920. The Mallow Union, which was much smaller in area than the Fermoy Union, probably lost around the same number.
The first wave of the disease, and probably the worst, came in October 1918 and continued until early December.
In Mitchelstown in early December, according to the ‘ Cork Examiner,’ “there are still a good number of people laid up,
SPANISH FLU IN NORTH CORK HAD A VERY SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON HUMAN LIFE, MOST OF WHICH HAS GONE UNNOTICED BY LOCAL HISTORIANS.
but fortunately very few serious cases”. Interestingly, the article noted that ‘ the experience of Mitchelstown, like other districts, shows clearly that it is not influenza itself that claims the death toll, but the deadly pneumonia which so often follows it, and which is often due to a lack of proper nursing and the imprudence of the patient in getting up too soon’.
Then, as now, the medical profession in Fermoy and Mitchelstown came in for considerable praise for its dedication and professionalism.
By mid-December, Fermoy Urban Council received a report from Dr M.A. O’Brien, its Medical Officer of Health, that ‘ the virulence of the epidemic has now passed’, and he recommended that places of entertainment should be