RIP Counties

Speaking in Dáil Éireann on July 11th, An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar dismissed excess deaths as an issue of concern – despite previously acknowledging in February there had been an increase (see videos here).

So it is good to see this new group using official General Register Office (GRO) and RIP.ie data to determine, in near real-time, the amount of excess deaths occurring in Ireland.

We hope you will spread the word about them – and print and share their leaflet. It is designed for home printing in either A4 single-sided or A5 double-sided format.

Their launch statement:

---

A Message Of Concern For Ireland

Who Are We? 

We are a collective, united by our shared concern for the well-being of our communities and by our interest in statistics. Free from political or corporate affiliations, our sole purpose is the pursuit of truth, especially concerning public health data. 

Why This Initiative? 

From the start of 2021, many of us began to notice more deaths than usual within our personal circles. Yet, without up-to-date data from official channels like the General Register Office and Central Statistics Office, we could not be sure. So, to bridge this gap, we developed a method to analyze excess deaths using RIP.ie, a website which catalogues over 99% of Irish deaths. 

Our Mission 

To provide the Irish public with accurate information about excess deaths, hoping to encourage informed debate, discussion and conversation. We aim to empower people to seek transparency and comprehensive investigations into rising death rates. 

How Can You Help? 

• Distribute the leaflet: attached are PDF leaflets designed for both colour and black-and-white printing. They can be printed as A4 single-sided or A5 double-sided. Share them in your community, at your workplace and/or with family and friends. You can also use the PDFs to order copies from your printing shop.  

• Be Considerate: many have faced trauma during these times. If distributing or talking about the leaflet, do so with care and gentleness. Allow people time to read, research and reach their own conclusions. 

• Support The Cause: As well as distributing the leaflet, you can support by volunteering or contributing to printing and delivery costs. Contact us through www.IrelandExcessDeaths.com

Our goal is for each person in Ireland to be informed, engaged, and empowered to make a difference. We believe we can achieve this together.

More on: IrelandExcessDeaths.com | Twitter | Telegram | TikTok

Recent changes to RIP.ie made our layman’s method unworkable. So, we have paused our project for the moment and are reflecting.

One of the key things emerging from these deliberations is that our numbers could be, and need to be, more accurate.

As pointed out here, our one-county-at-a-time approach meant there would be some duplicates across two or more counties. We assumed this wouldn’t be a big deal as our intention was to encourage others to look at trends within a chosen county.

But as people did so and the county graphs accumulated, it became more apparent that comparing trends in one county to those in another might also be desirable. Additionally, duplicates across counties would mean the final national total would be exaggerated – thus undermining this project’s credibility and usefulness.

We realise now a better approach would have been to start at national level, remove the duplicates there and then count the notices in each county.

If we can manage to do that we’ll update our website. One thing is certain though, it’s going to take us some time.

The new website format/design has been applied to RIP.ie

So, as anticipated our basic “copy & paste” method no longer works as before. Also, clicking old URLs saved in a spreadsheet (e.g. when checking if two entries are duplicates) gives us “404 page not found” errors.

The intention was that our method could be replicated by others with similarly basic spreadsheet skills – thereby allowing other ‘ordinary folk’ to check things for themselves and not have to take the expert or official word for things.

But perhaps…

• a more adept spreadsheet user will soon figure out how to paste RIP notices into a sheet in a usable format and tell us how, or
• some of the more computer-savvy people we are talking with will come up with something, or
• there are other as yet unconsidered solutions?

In the meantime we will finish off the counties we have the data for and hope this is not the end of our project.

But if it is, we can only hope our work to date has helped the growing grass-roots efforts to highlight the change in death patterns of recent years and the media and official silence on the matter.

A silence which stands in stark contrast to their incessant clamouring about the numbers (they claimed) were dying early in the pandemic.

… the other night I experienced the impending new RIP.ie site design, briefly, while they were testing it. Here’s what I noticed.

The new search form seemed not to welcome typed entries into the date fields. Rather, clicking of the calendar icon and arrows seemed to be required. Tedious for our purposes.

Results were still created 40 rows at a time but with new spacing. So the results took up more screen space and more scrolling was needed to reach the ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ links at the bottom.

Worst of all though… while selection and copying of the results was still possible, pasting into a Calc sheet did not auto-create 40 rows of data. Instead, all 40 rows (each containing 4 columns) ended up in just one cell and experimentation with CSV importing didn’t resolve the issues sufficiently to allow us use our Method as normal.

So, unless a work around can be found, or the new platform behaves differently from what I experienced that night, we might be unable to update our existing counties beyond May 2023. Or add others as we had hoped.¹Aiming to replicate our Method across the 26 counties of the Republic.

If that is the case, we can only hope our work to date can still help the efforts to highlight the change in death patterns in recent years and the media and official silence on the matter – which stands in stark contrast to their incessant clamouring about deaths and (apparent) desire to save lives early in the pandemic.

---

• 1
  Aiming to replicate our Method across the 26 counties of the Republic.