New funeral laws after fears over criminalising mourners
O’Callaghan points out ‘illogical’ regulations as Harris set to extend limit to 25 mourners
HEALTH Minister Simon Harris will today sign new laws to allow up to 25 friends or family to attend a funeral after concerns were raised that the existing regulations criminalised mourners.
Fianna Fail justice spokesman Jim O’Callaghan wrote to Mr Harris last week to raise concerns the regulations restricting attendance at funerals were creating a situation where certain mourners were being criminalised for no legitimate public purpose.
Government guidance so far has said that no more than 10 people should attend a funeral.
The regulations underpinning this make it a criminal offence, punishable with a prison term of up to six months, to attend a funeral if you did not live with the deceased or were not a close family member.
But Mr O’Callaghan said the wording of the updated regulations signed by Mr Harris on May 17 created a situation where, if no one lived with the deceased and no family member attended the funeral, an unlimited number of the deceased’s friends could lawfully attend without any offence being committed.
But, he said the regulations as worded meant that if one family member attended a funeral then no friends would be permitted.
Mr O’Callaghan’s letter explained: “Therefore under the first scenario it would be perfectly lawful to attend a funeral with hundreds of other people, yet under the second scenario you will be criminalised for attending a funeral which has only one other person, a family member of the deceased, present.
“I think you need to confront the illogicality and disproportionality of this law that criminalises certain mourners for no legitimate public purpose.
“If the purpose of the regulation is to limit the number of people attending a funeral service then this should be stated expressly rather than assuming that a deceased person with no family who lived on their own will probably have few friends.”
Mr O’Callaghan asked Mr Harris to either remove the regulation or set a numerical limit to the number of mourners who can attend a funeral.
Mr Harris will today sign a statutory instrument which allows up to 25 people, including family or friends, to attend a funeral from tomorrow as part of the Government’s easing of the Covid-19 restrictions.
MEASURING the impact of the pandemic on mortality has been an issue in many countries. There have been significant differences in how Covid-19 deaths have been recorded. However, one measure that shouldn’t be subject to differences in approach is a count of the total number of deaths.
For most countries, it now seems that counting the number of deaths and using that to estimate what is known as excess mortality is the most reliable way of measuring the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on deaths.
In most countries, this happens quickly: deaths must be registered in a matter of days and crude count statistics can be quickly compiled.
This is not the case in Ireland. We have a threemonth window for deaths to be registered with the General Registry Office (GRO) — one of the longest registration periods in the world. So can we tell whether the officially reported figures for Covid-19 deaths in Ireland match the excess mortality we are seeing in the community? It seems we can.
We might take our ease with formally registering deaths but the timely holding of funerals is almost a national prerogative. Almost all funeral directors post the arrangements for funerals under their care on the website RIP.ie.
Official monthly mortality statistics are available from June 1960, but due to the delay in registration, and then processing for statistical purposes, they are only yet available as far as June 2019.
Obviously a count of death notices is not a formal measure of mortality but in the absence of up-todate mortality figures from official sources, it has proved to be a useful proxy.
While the official mortality statistics are useless for telling us what is happening now, they do show that this time of year typically sees around 85 deaths per day in Ireland.
In recent years, the average number of unique daily posts on RIP.ie for April and May has also been around 85 per day.
This was not the case in 2020. The number of notices posted per day on RIP.ie moved away from the recent average in late March and reached a peak of around 140 per day in mid-April. Since then there has been a significant decrease and by the end of May the level of notices being posted was back within previous norms.
There is no longer any excess mortality, although Covid-19 deaths may continue.
April was a particularly bad month for mortality in Ireland. It is likely to have seen more deaths than any April since modern records began in 1960. On a deathsper-day basis, January and February are typically the worst months but April
2020 is likely to have been the second-deadliest month since January 2000. Thankfully, this peak was short-lived.
March 20 was the first day with multiple deaths related to Covid-19. The figures from RIP.ie give an estimate of around
1,550 excess deaths from then until the end of May, equivalent to 25pc more deaths than might typically have been expected.
Official figures put all Covid-19 deaths, both confirmed and probable, over the same period at 1,650, a difference of little more than one per day from the estimated excess using RIP.ie.
If it is confirmed that excess mortality is the best way of assessing the impact of the pandemic on deaths, then it looks as if the Irish figures for Covid-19 have been some of the most comprehensive, and accurate, in the world.
This accuracy though has come at a cost of timeliness. Some countries have only counted laboratoryconfirmed deaths in hospital settings.
These figures can be collected quickly, and will be good for identifying trends, but are clearly not comprehensive.
In Ireland, a decision was taken to only include deaths in the data as they are formally registered with the GRO. This means the figures for Covid-19 deaths
LAST JOURNEY: A funeral in Dublin in April as the Covid-19 death toll mounted
announced each day by the Chair of the National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet), Dr Tony Holohan, can include deaths that occurred several weeks earlier.
These delays mean the daily figures, although ultimately giving a comprehensive account of Covid-19 deaths, may not be useful for identifying trends. It also means that a
European-wide project on excess mortality had to put a warning on its website about the reliability of the figures for Ireland provided by the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HSPC). This is where informal sources such as RIP.ie can help.
A comparison of the excess mortality from
RIP.ie and Covid-19 deaths by date of occurrence shows a strong overlap. They both start to rise in late March, peak in mid-April and had fallen away by the end of May — though it did take some weeks for the precise trend to be clear from the official Covid-19 figures.
The figures from
RIP.ie have been tracked since the start of the crisis and have given a realtime indication as excess mortality rose and fell.
It appears that some of this analysis was replicated by the Health Information and Quality Authority
(Hiqa) for Nphet and Dr Tony Holohan described the findings using RIP.ie as “robust” in a recent press briefing.
The crisis has brought many costs but maybe one small gain is that it has helped identify an informal real-time proxy of excess mortality which could serve as a early warning indicator long before any increase in death registrations is seen at the General Registry Office.
‘April was particularly bad for mortality’