On Tuesday afternoon, news emerged from Cork that a woman may have lain dead at home for up to three years before her body was finally discovered on the southside of the city by a man working for a pest control firm.
It is so far understood that the pest control company had been called out to deal with a problem at a nearby property on the estate, and traced the problem to the house, where the deceased lived alone.
The woman, believed to be in her early sixties, was found in a downstairs back room in a house near The Lough after the gardaí were alerted to the sad discovery in the quiet residential area.
Gardaí, the fire service, the ambulance service and a doctor all attended the scene at the house in Brookfield Lawn, after the badly decomposed body was found. Gardaí say they are satisfied there was nothing suspicious about the death, while door-to-door inquiries so far seem to have established that the woman, who lived alone, was last seen out and about in 2021.
It’s not the first recent case of its kind from Cork, unfortunately. Some readers will remember a harrowing story from last year, when it came to light that 61-year-old Tim O’Sullivan had died alone and laid undiscovered at his home in Mallow, Cork, for over twenty years.
An inquest held last October heard how Mr O’Sullivan’s skeletal remains were found in his boarded-up terraced single story home, for 22 years, all the while his family spent two decades wondering where he was.
It emerged that one of Mr O’Sullivan’s sisters, who had previously kept in touch with her brother regularly through letters and cards, had called to the house in mid-2003 after communication stopped, and got no answer. The family had no way of accessing the house without breaking and entering.
His sister Noreen recalled how, while visiting Ireland with her husband, there was little perceptible sign that Tim was living at the house, with those in the local area presuming he had returned to England.
“We tried knocking on the door but received no answer and we looked through the windows to see if there was any sign that Tim was living there and we could see into the living area and it looked like nobody had been living there for a while,” she said.
“Even though there were things on the table they looked like they hadn’t been disturbed in a while.”
After contacting local gardaí to raise concerns about her brother, the authorities “said that the matter was looked into thoroughly, that there was nobody living in the house and that from investigations made locally, it was certain he had returned to the UK and that was where the family should continue to search.”
The house, on Beecher Street in Mallow, was boarded up in later years, without adequate checks being carried out inside the house.
Details of the case are haunting, and make for heartbreaking reading. When the house was finally entered last year by Council workers seeking to change the locks, they found a large mound of post, brochures and leaflets in the hallway.
They also found a diary in the house with the last entries made on January 9, 10 and 11, 2001.
The entry for January 9 read: “Going to Tesco today, first time.” They also found a Tesco receipt for that date.
The family, speaking last year, said that the discovery of Mr O’Sullivan – fully dressed in a bed inside the property – was “their worst case scenario.” There were multiple reports about how Tim had struggled with poor mental health, however, referring to his separation from his wife in the UK, they said: “Really it was more a case of a man with a broken heart who wished for privacy and time to be alone to come to terms with his separation as was his right.”
His sister Noreen said that when they left, they had always assumed gardaí would investigate. She recalled how, when she phoned the garda a week later, he had no further information.
“I always presumed that the garda had actually taken some action to investigate our enquiry before coming to their conclusion. I expected that they had gone into the house but obviously no-one did,” she said.
This week’s case in Cork is tinged with a sense of tragic deja vu, with investigators saying they will now examine any unopened post or other documents in the house, along with food items for expiry dates to try and figure out when the woman may have died.
There was another similarly sad case in Ireland, not long before the discovery of Tim O’Sullivan’s body – in the summer of 2022 – when the bodies of elderly couple, Nicholas and Hilary Smith, were discovered in a house in the sleepy village of Cloneen, in Tipperary.
Both Hillary Smith, 79, and Nicholas Smith, 82, were dead at least a year – perhaps up to 18 months – when their remains were discovered on June 20th 2022 at their home in Rosanne, Cloneen, the state pathologist said.
There was no evidence of trauma or outside involvement in the deaths of an elderly couple, who had been married since 1967, an inquest held last summer heard. The couple, who died within a short time of each other, had relocated to Tipperary from England after they had retired.
One of the most striking aspects of the upsetting case was the recovery of a torn-up letter, found in a bin by investigators, which painted a dismal picture of the life the elderly British couple were living in Ireland.
In the letter, the couple were scathing of the Irish health system and elderly care here, describing treatment of older people as “very patronising and cruel.” They were “perfectly healthy before we came to Ireland,” the discarded letter said.
The tragic letter referred to Hilary’s deteriorating state and said that she was “weak from lack of food” and writing with “arthritic hands”.
Shedding light on the final moments of the tragic couple, in the letter they added that it is “so sad and cruel to end this way,” with the couple signing off the letter with, “Nicholas and Hillary Smith, late of Hong Kong and other places,” and the admission: “We should ever, ever have set foot in Ireland.”
That makes three desperately sad cases in the space of less than two years in our small nation, posing the obvious, dreaded question: How many more people may be left undiscovered at home? And how much of a problem is extreme loneliness in Ireland?
Indeed, a rise in the number of people not found for significant periods of time has become a cause for alarm in Britain, pointing to embedded societal problems not unique to Ireland. The number of people found decomposed in England and Wales has been rising, according to a 2023 study from researchers at the University of Oxford and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.
Examining CSO figures, researchers found that there had been a steady increase in undefined deaths between 1979 and 2020 for both men and women. While just 59 such deaths were recorded in 1961, this compared to 1,042 in 2021, the most recent figures.
The proportion of total male deaths exceeded female deaths, with these deaths increasing significantly among males during the 1990 and 2000s, when overall mortality had seen a significant improvement. UK researchers said that the rise in deaths where people are found decomposed, particularly for men, is a trend which is deeply concerning.
“The increase in people found dead from unknown causes suggests wider societal breakdowns of both formal and informal social support networks. They are concerning and warrant urgent further investigation. We call on national and international authorities to consider measures that would make it possible to identify these deaths more easily in routine data,” they wrote in the startling report.
It is the case in the UK, as it is the case in Ireland, that the vast majority of people who died at home and developed advanced decomposition would have suffered significant social isolation. While all details are not yet known, the lady found on Tuesday in Cork, has been described as a recluse.
Previous research found that the Covid pandemic caused a spike in these types of deaths, because of government enforced lockdowns, however, as Oxford academics indicated, the overall upwards trend is something which predates Covid.
Surely, the way in which such deaths – when a body has laid undiscovered in a house – have gone from being an incredibly rare phenomenon, to something we hear about more or less every year in Ireland, indicates that we are experiencing rising levels of social neglect.
Societal breakdown of community seems to have worsened, while familial and social support networks have tumbled. This is despite the fact we pride ourselves on being more connected than ever, with many of us glued to smartphones with instant access to whatsapp and facetime and text messages. How can it be that we are somehow less connected than ever? How can someone die alone in our constantly plugged in society, and lie undiscovered for years?
Have we lost the art of simple human connection? Maybe the lesson here is that we have to go back to basics. It’s not hard to see how phones and the internet have damaged society in some ways that seem irreparable, especially faced with the constant public sea of people immersed in their smartphones. Increasingly, we are living in our own worlds. There’s little doubt that social media has helped foster and accelerate a culture of me-centred individualism, which in the end, is a culture of loneliness.
Social breakdown is booming, and it does raise the question: Are smartphones making us care less about humanity? Are we all becoming more selfish?
There’s also the question of how we view the elderly, and how we allow them to be neglected. It is past time our government faced up to the impact of the loneliness pandemic it created – a pandemic that was worse than Covid all along. It was shameful how we locked down our elderly, with those in care homes deprived of any contact with loved ones in the name of healthcare. So many of our oldest and most helpless citizens died alone, and four years on, still no one is answerable for it.
We’re quick to dismiss victims of such tragedies as recluses, and a lot of us will shrug off sad occurrences with the default, “Well, the person must have had mental health problems.”
But maybe some of the dreadful cases we hear about could have been avoided if more attention had been paid to others around us. If a quick knock at the door had been our response to not seeing an older person pottering about for a couple of days. We like to think we would have done differently, but maybe we wouldn’t have checked in either. And that in itself is a symptom of a society which is growing lonelier by the day.