Ms Louise Walsh:

There needs to be a crisis centre. There is no point in telling a parent to bring the child to the accident and emergency services. We were there too many times and on the third occasion there was a group of young fellows around my son's age and one of them had got hurt playing hurling or football. My son should have been one of those but he was there for a different reason. He could not sit in accident and emergency. He had to sit outside and he said he could not cope because he was not able for it. He could not cope with the people. He sat outside in the cold. I told the nurse we were outside the door. She did her best. She tried to accommodate us and she brought us into the family room to wait. The family room was the only room available in that accident and emergency and it was the same room my three sons had been brought into to discuss their father's death and what would happen next. That was the only facility available for us that night.

There needs to be a crisis centre in order that we are not ringing the Garda or accident and emergency and going through that hullabaloo. There needs to be an emergency line that a parent can ring and say his or her child is in crisis and he or she needs help now. It could even be only a room where a parent could sit with his or her child and make a cup of tea and not be judged by people who are in with broken legs or all the other traumas that one sees in accident and emergency. That is hard to cope with at the best of times but for someone aged 17 who is trying to kill himself, that is not the place to be. Every hospital in the country should have a crisis centre, not just for children but for adults as well. If the parents are told they have to wait four or five hours for the on-call doctor to come to see the child, there should be a safe place to sit, next to security, to keep their child safe and to be safe themselves as well. That is what I have seen that is not fair.