The space allocated to historical events in our social memory is strangely uneven. Pandemics seem more than usual subject to social forgetting, especially if we look at the so-called Spanish flu.

The toll is almost unimaginable, between 50 and 100 million people, mostly young people aged 25 to 35. Between two and five people out of 100 died.

In Ireland, 23,000 people died. It should occupy a disproportionate place in our memory, but the opposite is true. Nor is our amnesia entirely explained by the pandemic being overshadowed by the First World War, nor in Ireland also by the aftermath of the Rising.

The tumultuous few years of the Covid-19 pandemic are already receding from our social memory, becoming blurry and surreal. But those whose loved ones died far from human contact or love, and those who are still traumatized by fighting this as frontline workers, have not forgotten.

This makes the insufficiency of the proposal Covid-19 assessment even more disappointing. It is not enough to say that “mistakes were made”, an expression which carefully deprives those who made them of a certain freedom to act. Nor is it fair to demonize those who worked under conditions of intense stress, facing a mysterious illness about which little was initially known, not even about the vectors of infection.

Politicians have said they don’t want this to be a scapegoating exercise. And yet, the historical inquiries into our industrial schools were just that, with the Church presented as a parasitic enemy of all progress, forcing the Irish to forget their common decency. The idea that people could have freely embraced their faith and even seen it as a source of hope in dark times in Irish history has disappeared.

The Church to which I belong deserved scrutiny and strong condemnation for the way it ran the industrial schools. But this wasn’t some sort of malevolent outside agency. It was ourselves. Our families willingly and even proudly encouraged their sons to become priests and their brothers and daughters to become nuns. People like Derek Scally, who asked about the fathers of the babies whose remains were found under the old Bon Secours house in Tuambegin to break down the simplistic narrative that somehow forces outside of us are solely responsible.

Likewise, it is important to examine how the recent pandemic has exposed and exacerbated the fractures and flaws present in Irish society. Our healthcare system was already overburdened and ill-prepared. Those who suffered the most and died in greater numbers were elderly people living in nursing homes. Significant work has been done to improve conditions in care homes, including through the Covid-19 Care Homes Expert Group. There is still much to do.

Why do we store our elderly people? Why are we talking about lives wasted when young people find themselves in these centers, but not lives wasted when elderly people who could be supported at home find themselves in these centers? The government has asked care homes that had visiting restrictions in place to reopen. He planned to deploy thousands of people from acute care hospitals to nursing homes without adequate testing or protections.

In May 2020, after eight weeks of confinement, aware of the social and psychological impact of strict confinement on people living in care homes, the Netherlands instituted a dedicated visits program. It allowed people to receive at least one visitor per week under strict conditions. Too many people have died alone in Ireland.

There are similar blind spots regarding religion and education. Numerous studies demonstrate the benefits of religious faith on mental health, including the most recent TILDA studywhich showed that gatherings for religious services decrease both loneliness and the desire to die among older adults. We locked people up harder, longer and more strictly than anywhere else in Europe in matters of religion, and reopening of churches came somewhere in importance after barbershops in governmental thinking.

It will take decades to undo the damage done to vulnerable adolescents and children during strict lockdowns. But when schools reopened, they received limited financial aid and then had to live in miserable conditions. Their reward, like that given to the nursing staff, was to see their efforts quickly forgotten.

Donncha O’Connell has highlighted the inadequacies of the proposed review chaired by Anne Scott, describing it in these pages as “a poorly defined and powerless inquisitorial framework“.

It is too late in the life of this government to remedy this situation. However, the new government should be reminded that the people need, want and deserve a proper accounting of the successes and failures of handling the pandemic.

The Spanish flu left in its wake intergenerational trauma, skillfully recorded in Ireland in an important work by Dr Ida Milne And Dr. Patricia Marsh. It is important that the story of Covid-19, and in particular the work of women who have borne the brunt of healthcare, juggled homeschooling and paid work, given birth alone, endured the violence from their partner and greater mental distress, is told in full. Forgetfulness and fraud are two unforgivable reactions.