John Gilroy (Labour) | Oireachtas source

To give context to what we are trying to achieve with this report, doing a public consultation throughout the country with members of the public who are not experts in this area but are interested in it is a starting point. Since I wrote the paper in draft form I have had the opportunity to meet some of the chief executive officers and leading people in some of our voluntary organisations. I met with Mr. Austin, Mr. Layden and Ms Freeman, and I met Ms Kenny this week. Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to meet Dr. Brophy. I was very impressed by the quality of thinking taking place at the top levels of our organisations.

We have heard the contributions from the witnesses and how some of them have approached the problem of suicide from their own perspective. We have heard a divergence of opinions, which is welcome. The Central Statistics Office will take the statistical approach, as one would expect. The coroner and even ourselves as politicians have a different perspective on how we might approach this area but juxtaposing those perspectives creates an energy with which we might be able to gain further insights. It is important that when we leave here today we do not forget about it. This process should be seen as a starting point.

I wish to clarify one or two issues that may not be clear from the report, one of which was raised by two witnesses earlier. It relates to the application of the geospatial analysis to the electoral division. There was no suggestion that we would use 10,000 of a population to change the rates of suicide; it was merely used for illustrative purposes. We could have used any other cohort of the population including small areas or even constituencies. The point is that there is data available within which cohorts can be measured and to which geospatial tools can be applied. That is not to suggest that we intend to change the way we map the rates of suicide.

I address this question to Mr. Raleigh. I congratulate him on his appointment. The new energy he has brought to the national office is obvious, even in the course of my travels in the past 18 months, and I commend him on that. When I mentioned the National Office for Suicide Prevention at a meeting there was no recognition of its value. Senator MacSharry's research from the year before last would verify that but that has changed since Mr. Raleigh took over the office, and we congratulate him on that.

We welcome that the national strategic framework is making good progress. When are we likely to see that? What agencies are involved in compilation of the policy?

The reason I refer to the National Office for Suicide Prevention and express the rather radical view that it should be removed from the area of mental health services, serves several purposes. One reason is that we are not very good at policy-making in this country and I mean generally, not just in the area of health or mental health. We have seen the results over the years, much to our dismay. Our policy-makers may be of the view that it is sufficient to decide policy at the top and expect it to be fully implemented at the bottom without being mediated through each stage of its implementation.
I commend the Reach Out document but it suffers from some of the flaws I have outlined. It is vague in many areas and its language is woolly, which is very difficult to understand. The document presents no measurable outcomes. There is no built-in formal annual review as opposed to an ad hocreview even though it is a ten-year policy across both sides of the recession. There is a great lack of resource planning. Some media reports last year - before Mr. Raleigh's time - may have suggested that the National Office for Suicide Prevention had underspent its budget in 2012.