It’s five years since Ireland’s first coronavirus case was confirmed – on February 29, 2020.
Throughout March, the Sunday Independent will look back at that time and report on the toll it took, talking to people whose lives were upended and asking how Covid has changed them — as well as Ireland itself
Five years on from Covid
It was an image that stopped the country in its tracks, one of those pictures that says far more than a thousand words ever could. Wearing a surgical mask outside Dublin’s Mount Jerome cemetery, funeral director Robert Maguire stood in front of a hearse carrying the remains of John Gallagher, a community leader whose life had been claimed by Covid-19. Nobody came to his funeral, because nobody was allowed to.
Underneath David Conachy’s extraordinary photo on the front page of the Sunday Independent was a headline that captured how things felt then, one week after the country had been locked down: “A nation changed utterly.