You can still go on to the Irish Covid dashboard and see the scary charts they produced to enforce lockdowns. Here is the chart for deaths by date notified.

It looks very similar to the charts produced in other countries. 'Oh My God, deaths are spiking, let's lock down the whole country!'

Except there was nothing exceptional about the number of deaths in Ireland. A new study undertaken by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation (OECD) examined recent mortality trends and the impact of demographic change.

The authors state that a simple comparison of the raw number of deaths with reference to a historical base period isn't accurate because many OECD countries have undergone major changes in population size and structure due to ageing and migration. These changes have a significant bearing when comparing absolute mortality numbers.

Nearly all the OECD counties saw rapid demographic change with the size of the 65+ population increasing by 19% between 2015 and 2022. The study concludes that when adjusting for demographic change, the average adjusted increase in the number of deaths for OECD would be +5.3%.

However, looking at many individual countries, such as Ireland, they noticed that there was no increase in excess deaths.

This was because between 2016 and 2022, Ireland's population had increased by 8% and the number of over-65s had risen by 22%. When taking these changes into account, suddenly all the scary excess deaths that kept Ireland in draconian lockdowns disappeared.