Some of the families of those who died in Dealgan House nursing home in Dundalk are calling for a full investigation into an outbreak of Covid-19 at the facility.
Dealgan House has been one of the worst hit care homes in the country with 23 residents dying since early April, many are believed to have died from Covid-19.
89-year-old Lily McArdle passed away on 7 April, at Our Lady of Lourdes hospital in Drogheda. She had been a resident at the nursing home for 18 months.
Her daughter Loretto Gaughran said once she contracted Covid-19, she deteriorated rapidly.
"She was hospitalised on the Saturday and we got a phone call on the Sunday morning to say that she was very poorly and when I got up to the hospital I went and talked to the doctor and he wasn't sure at that stage if it was Covid, but he was pretty sure it was."
Lilly McArdle passed away on 7 April at our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, with a nurse by her side.
As Loretto Gaughran came to terms with her mother's death, she said she then had to deal with the scale of the outbreak at the nursing home.
"I had got to the stage where I was afraid to look at rip.ie. I knew so many people in the home and every day it wasn't unusual to see three and four people on it. I would go on in the morning and see that there's another woman I know, a woman across the corridor from Mommy. The woman next door to her also died," she said.
Loretto Gaughran is critical of communication from the nursing home.
"The one call I had from the nursing home was to ask me could they move her belongings out of her room. Not to commiserate with me, or anything like that. I also find it quite astonishing that it took a Dáil question to be raised for them to actually address some of the queries that have been raised."
On 17 April the RCSI hospital group took over the operational management of the nursing home. HIQA has said it will carry out an inspection.
"They need to talk to management and they need to talk to residents that are there. They also need to talk to families of those that are no longer with us. We are their voice but we also have an experience and a story to tell about our experiences of how Covid was handled. It won't bring Mommy back but lessons need to be learned," said Ms Gaughran.
95-year-old Florrie Cleary was another resident of Dealgan House. She passed away on 24 April.
Her daughter Ann said she last visited her mother on 8 March as she was concerned about bringing the virus into the home.
"I last seen her on 8 March. I did say goodbye to her on that day knowing something might happen and I might not see her again but I felt that was the best thing that I could do for her because at one level I can't control the virus, but there was so many things I could do to minimise the risk," she said.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
While Florrie Cleary tested negative for the virus in the days before her death, her daughter Ann says she is left with more questions than answers.
"Doesn't somebody need to find out what happened. I think we need to find out what happened pretty quickly. I know we'll be finding stuff out about this virus for years but surely we need to start making some efforts to gather evidence now," said Ms Cleary.
For now these families are trying to grieve, but they say their search for answers will continue.
"These were people, they had families, they lived lives. They may not have been people who wrote books or were powerful or had a lot of money or whatever else, but they deserved respect. I just feel they've been left voiceless by this," said Ann Cleary.
In a statement to RTÉ News, Dealgan House said the bereaved families, public representatives and the people of Dundalk have a right to ask questions and expect answers as to what happened, how the virus spread and whether it could have been prevented or mitigated.
It said, now that the management and staff are back to almost full capacity, it is also looking to ascertain where the virus came from in the first place.
The statement said that during the month of March, it made every effort to keep the virus out, in terms of banning visitors, strengthening infection control, educating staff further on standard infection control measures using the specific advice emanating from the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET).
The NPHET guidance at the time was that temperature was the key symptom along with a dry cough or breathing difficulty.
"Few of our residents who tested positive displayed these symptoms, with many only being discovered that they were in fact Covid positive after passing away despite being asymptomatic," the statement said.
The nursing home said it welcomed the HIQA inspection announced last Friday and will fully cooperate with it and it will make all their data and records available to the Inspectors as required.
The statement also said that Dealgan House has apologised to residents families for the lack of communication with individual families at the height of the outbreak when the absence of key staff, constraints in moving around the nursing home and the inability of nurses to take calls when engaged in care tasks while dressed in full PPE, made responses to individual calls very difficult.
The nursing home said it hopes that residents' families have noticed a marked improvement over the last couple of weeks as key staff have returned to work.
