Did the pandemic make people more resilient in Ireland?
Trinity College psychiatry professor Brendan Kelly said lockdown has made us “stronger and more kind,” but we must remember the lessons learned along the way.
His new book explores other pandemics that have happened in Ireland over the years, as written about by William Wilde, the father of playwright Oscar Wilde, in the 1800s.
On The Hard Shoulder today, Dr Kelly said pandemics tend to follow a pattern.
“COVID was not the first epidemic, it turns out it has happened many times and it follows a very specific pattern,” he said.
“In 1856, Sir William Wilde wrote that many of the plagues from which this country suffered were ‘continuations of waves of pestilence that came from the east, orient and over the European continent.’
“He wrote about plagues and epidemics that came from China, through Europe and arrived in Ireland – a pattern many people may be familiar with.”
Spanish Flu
Dr Kelly said the Spanish Flu has long been forgotten in the Irish psyche.
“Between 50 million and 100 million people died of the Spanish flu - it was an extraordinary event,” he said.
“It was different, as it was around the time of the First World War which distracted a great deal of attention away from it.
“The other thing is the pattern of the Spanish Flu was interestingly different – it was more fatal to younger people than older people, an unusual feature.”
Learning lessons
Dr Kelly said remembering pandemics is important to learn lessons but we tend to “move on very quickly” in Ireland.
“An enormous number of people have spoken about how quickly we have moved on from COVID on this occasion,” he said.
“There’s a bunch of reasons, but possibly one of them is an evolutionary purpose that we tend to move on quickly because we need to – there are things to do.”
More resilience
Dr Kelly said one thing we should learn from COVID is we are much more resilient as a people “than we give ourselves credit for”.
“What we found during the pandemic is that one in five people found it very difficult coping, which is a lot of people, over one million,” he said.
“On the other hand, it means somehow that four million people found the resources and the resilience to cope with an extraordinary situation and get through it.
“If you had told most of us ten years ago there would be a pandemic, we wouldn’t be allowed to go more than 2km from our homes, there would be no air travel, schools were closed – I would have imagined very few people would cope at all.”
The date of a COVID inquiry into the country's handling of the pandemic is expected to be announced in the coming weeks.
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Main image: Members of the public wearing face masks on the Luas during the COVID pandemic, 05/01/2022. Image: Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie
