A disastrous battle plan has led to this avoidable tragedy

THE entirely predictable horror story of lost lives and human suffering now being played out in nursing homes and residential care centres is shameful beyond measure.

From the very start we all knew that this new and deadly coronavirus posed particular threats to older people and others with underlying health conditions.

They were the most vulnerable, we were told – repeatedly, like a mantra, time out of number.

That’s why eventually the Government, on the advice of their experts, adopted cocooning as a means of protecting people over 70 years of age from the risks posed by the virus. However, we now know that while doing that for older people who were healthy enough to live at home or with relatives, those requiring residential care in nursing homes were, in effect, abandoned to their own devices.

If we’re really engaged in a war against the coronavirus, then this is clearly not the way to fight it.

The first thing you do in wartime is check out your weak points and defences. We knew the elderly were at risk, particularly those living together in large numbers in care homes.

However, as infectious disease expert Dr Jack Lambert said, the health authorities and the Government failed to put together ‘a battle plan’ for such facilities. Instead, he said the focus was on acute hospitals and as a result we now have a huge disaster on our hands which he describes as a ‘national emergency’.

By Friday more than 300 of the 487 deaths from Covid-19 occurred in nursing homes and residential care centres. That’s SIX out of every TEN. This terrible, truly shocking fact is a compelling rebuke to those of us who think we’re any better than previous generations who were responsible for institutional abuse of countless numbers of also vulnerable people in Magdalene sweatshops and orphanages and correction centres run by some very unholy nuns and not entirely Christian Brothers.

How are we any different, in the light of these nursing home deaths?

The forcing by the State (that’s us) of elderly people into private sector nursing homes flows from a doctrine of neglect which has unfailingly produced cycle after cycle of misery.

And now the caretaker Health Minister Simon Harris – who won’t be remembered for taking much care politically on this precise detail – says more needs to be done to protect the elderly in such residential care settings.

Give that general another medal!

All this, of course, emerges as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael produced their wish list draft document aimed at forming a new government – a piece of work that reads more like comic farce as the grim death-march spectacle plays out in nursing homes.

The parties call for universal healthcare, a new social contract and a more inclusive Ireland. Tell that to the families of those who have now been sacrificed to an entirely foreseeable catastrophe.

The document is full of pious hopes and insulting platitudes which clearly suggest both Micheál Martin and Leo Varadkar believe we’ve the memory of a goldfish. They say, despite the economic disaster arising from Covid-19, that there will be ‘no cuts to established core social welfare rates’. Wasn’t that exactly what former Labour Leader Joan Burton said following the financial crash of 10 years ago as she proceeded to slash and burn all periphery schemes to ‘core’ payments?

And then they threw in that old chestnut – their belief that Ireland’s ‘best days are still ahead’.

If we work really hard, suffer temporarily in this present Vale of Tears, heaven is just around the corner. Always out there, in the future. But never now.

The negligence that has led to the awful tragedy in nursing homes gives increased urgency to the need for a new government with democratic authority.

Micheál Martin and Leo Varadkar have a responsibility that has yet to be discharged.

And the first decision of their new government should be to establish an inquiry into how so little was done by so few for so many of our elderly when the obligation was so glaringly obvious.

And we need to know, precisely, who was responsible for actions that weren’t taken and requirements that weren’t met.