Nurses risked everything for us during the pandemic. Now many are abandoned to its awful legacy

Irish Times

20-06-2025

It's not a question of if, but when. Scientists are warning that a new pandemic is lurking over the horizon poised to pounce on us.
'It's an epidemiological certainty,' says WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
'Are we ready for the next one?' asks everyone from Boston College and Johns Hopkins University to the Economist and the United Nations.
'No,' is the straight answer for this country.
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Ireland's grubby treatment of its
Covid-19
heroes will cause some frontline workers to think twice the next time before they risk their lives for the greater good. Specifically, the nurses – those people who did not have the luxury of working from home, who imperilled themselves by caring for the infected, who self-isolated while off duty and eschewed public transport to avoid transmitting the virus, who hesitated to touch their own children but held the hands of the dying when their families could not be with them in the final days of their lives and who then zipped them inside body bags and phoned their kin to inform them the one they loved had gone.
They did it in terrifying circumstances under the claustrophobic weight of protective gowns, hairnets, shoe covers, gloves, face shields and masks. In the early days, the masks were the standard surgical type and sorely inadequate. There were no vaccines for the first 10 months. Nurses and other hospital workers saw colleagues fall ill and be taken away to ICU to be put on ventilators. More than 20 healthcare workers died from Covid.
What thanks have they got for all that? A €1,000 crisis bonus that their union representatives had to beg for before it was eventually paid.
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To this day, there is a cohort of forgotten heroes whose abandonment brings shame on us all. They are the ones who went out and defended the barriers for the rest of us and now they are living with that awful legacy called long Covid. While normal life of honking traffic, construction sites, children in school uniforms, packed restaurants and pubs and big weddings has resumed outside their front door, they remain trapped in a post-pandemic freeze frame. Extreme fatigue, brain fog, weakened immunity, headaches, muscular pain, palpitations and shortness of breath have left them unable to go back to work. Some days, they cannot even get out of bed.
One young nurse who was assigned to a Covid ward in a big Dublin hospital told me she has cardiac complications and has been on antibiotics four times in the past seven months. Another said she contracted Covid in January 2021, that zero hour following the Government's 'meaningful Christmas'.
Four and a half years later, she is attending a long Covid clinic and is being treated by an infectious diseases consultant, a cardiac consultant, a GP and an occupational therapist. She is on daily medication for tachycardia (fast heart rate) as well as low-dose naltrexone (LDN), aspirin for micro-clots, painkillers and numerous supplements.
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She is one of 20 nurses with long Covid who are suing the HSE, the Department of Health and their employer hospitals for compensation. They issued the High Court proceedings two years ago. The State is fighting them.
Simultaneously, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) was in the Labour Court last week seeking to extend a long Covid special payment scheme for public health workers who are still suffering the consequences. The scheme, which has been extended three times already following public controversy, is scheduled to expire on June 30th. Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has told the Dáil it will definitely be terminated this time.
The departments of Social Protection and Public Expenditure maintain it is not possible to definitively identify the source of infection for each of the 120 nurses affected. The last time the State was so ruthlessly parsimonious was when Charlie Haughey precipitated the 1989 general election rather than sanction £400,000 compensation for 106 individuals who had been infected with the Aids virus by State-supplied blood.
It's an attitude that brings to mind Oscar Wilde's definition of a fool as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. An asinine State is one willing to pay €335,000 for a
politicians' bike shelter
but repays its true champions with the threat of impoverishment.
Ireland and Greece are the only EU countries that do not recognise Covid and long Covid as an occupational illness for patient-facing workers
If the special long Covid payment scheme ends in two weeks, its current recipients will be switched to the normal public service sick leave scheme. It means that for the first three months they will receive their basic wage – with no allowance made for the night-duty premiums and overtime many nurses rely on. They will get half their wage for the subsequent three months. With rents or mortgages to pay, their worry amid a national homelessness crisis raises the stress levels long Covid thrives on.
During the pandemic, our cocooned communities gathered outside our homes in the grim lockdown evenings to applaud the country's frontline workers for caring for us. Even TDs stood in the Dáil chamber to clap. How would we have reacted had we known then that this would be the thanks they would get?
'It's gone from a round of applause to a middle finger from the Government,' said a nurse identified as Siobhán on RTÉ radio last year.
Ireland and Greece are the only EU countries that do not recognise Covid and, ergo, long Covid as an occupational illness for patient-facing workers. That anomaly means nurses, doctors, porters, caterers, paramedics, fire fighters, gardaí and everyone else who contracted long Covid while protecting the rest of us are ineligible for occupational injury benefit payments.
A Department of Social Protection report in November 2023 suggested that uncertainty about the condition's longevity in individual cases was a prohibitive factor. What a callous calculation that must be to ponder if you cannot get out of bed and don't know when you ever will.
Our culture takes nurses for granted. We'll pat them on the head and call them our angels of mercy, because tokenism works when you are dealing with people motivated by a vocational duty to the greater good.
They deserve better.