Michelle Mulherin (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for attending. I know the Minister of State takes this issue seriously. Too often, at least where I am from, it is a tragic situation and seems to happen across the demographic, including gender, etc. We all have experiences in life of dark periods so we try to fathom how a person gets to that point. One point the Minister of State noted is that it is hard to see this. My gut feeling is that suicide is preventable, as Mr. Raleigh said, but it will be with us, for the very simple reason people choose it. That ties in to the concept of help taking mentioned by Mr. Raleigh. The witnesses will hear opinions from us. We grapple with this issue but we are not experts. However, when one sees what happens in the wake of a suicide - a wife left to rear children by herself, families devastated - I sometimes wonder about it, though not from a point of view of guilt or anything like that. I am familiar with the work of Console and all the brave families of bereaved people and their friends who come forward to battle this, to say this death will make a difference, this person did not die in vain, they are going to reach out to people and tell them to reach out and get the help they hoped their loved one might have received.

The situation is many-pronged. We have described different people, whether they are from a particular age group, as mentioned by Deputy Boyd Barrett, or others who find themselves in all kinds of circumstances. Therefore there must be different ways to reach out to these people and elicit a response. Sometimes I wonder if it is more empowering to be told something, that even if right now I have a feeling, that feeling will pass. I can make a choice and be told it is my choice and that, no matter what my bank account is like, or my job, or what anything is like in this life, there is always hope. That should be reinforced in people. It is always darkest before the dawn, as the Minister of State remarked. There is a darkest point and then it passes. We know about the dark points.

I believe the stories of the families are important. Of course they do not proclaim the heartbreak involved but they might talk about the facts and figures. I can only imagine that the situation comes down to what a person answers to the question, "How is my mental health - what does it look like when it is good, when it is bad?" This depression becomes a reality, it does not become, "Well, I am like this, but there is something else". It becomes the person's life. There is a vortex he or she seems to be drawn towards, the inevitable. That is a lie, however, because there is a choice. The reaching out part seems to be about the person knowing help is available. I cannot profess to know the ins and outs of all the services in my area but it seems they are there, and there are groups around. The reaching out and the acceptance of this appears to me to be a particular problem.

I agree with the Minister of State that it is a loss of hope which has fractured our society. We may be able to understand this loss in the context that as we become more modern and cosmopolitan life is more and more about the individual and individual successes.

I can see how, with people going to college, it is in many ways great to get an education, but there are so many other facets to the human being aside from a career, car, family or job. These are external factors and anything else is being lost. It is a consequence of the Celtic tiger, which was not just an economic phenomenon, but rather a belief system. As a result people believed they had no value if they could not pitch themselves in any of the areas I have outlined. That is also a lie.

That is the issue and it is exacerbated because of the way things are in a recession. In life and politics we may strive towards excellence but we will never be perfect, so we must consider the positive aspects. I would like people, even those in the Opposition, to say that we must work on those. Politicians and community leaders have a powerful platform and if they choose to dwell on despair, the vulnerable people who only hear messages on the radio or in the newspaper will be sacrificed, sometimes just for quick political gain. I am not trying to be naïve about the way politics or opposition works but sometimes we should be able to say we have a lot going for us in the country, and we only have to look outside the island to see how valuable is the freedom of our democracy. In the Third World we can see real problems.