Ms Louise Walsh:

As regards how I would spend the money, to be perfectly honest, the way the HSE and health service is at the moment, we are losing all our staff. It is happening everywhere. In Waterford, we have the cardiac care problem. We have no resources. No one in their right mind would stay working in the HSE. Unless wages are increased, we are going to lose the best people. No one would stay working in a hospital that is understaffed, where there is a lack of resources and staff are not appreciated, when it is possible to go private and get paid probably twice as much with better conditions. That is happening across the board in Ireland at the moment with our nurses, doctors and everyone.

It is not a case of just going out and hiring all these people. We have to treat people properly or they will not come to work in the system. That is my view of the underlying problem. We are not paying people enough. I would increase people's wages so they can work in our health system and do the job they went to college to train for and be paid properly. They should not be falling asleep on their feet because they are stretched to the limit. I see it myself working in the public service. I would say the bill across the public service for people going out on stress-related illness is going to be colossal because there are not enough people working across the board. That has to be changed before we can get the proper people in to work in mental health or anywhere else. That is where I would spend the money.

Senator Freeman asked if we had any idea of what was going on beforehand. I was shocked and disgusted and felt very let down. I think more was spent advertising mental health services than providing them. I sat all night and watched those advertisements on television. There was nothing there.

I wrote to the head of the HSE in the south east area. I told him what had happened, and how many times we had tried to access resources. I had phoned CAMHS the week before my son ended up in the adult ward and told them that he was really bad. We had an appointment for the following Monday and I asked them to bring forward his appointment. They told me no, we had an appointment and we had to wait for it and that was that. They did not have the resources to give him another appointment. I turned up on Monday. I left the psychiatric ward and went over for his appointment. I said, "Here I am. My son is over there in the acute psychiatric ward and will not attend his appointment today." That is the service I got.

When I wrote to the head of the HSE, the reply I got was a list of all the resources available - Squashy Couch, the TYRE Garda youth diversion project, all these wonderful places where I could have brought my son. When a child is in crisis and is trying to get a knife in the kitchen to kill himself, a parent cannot say "come on, let us head off and we will go to Squashy Couch or another place and we will have a little chat about your problems". That is not the answer. The HSE tried to justify it by telling me the services were there and I did not access them. I tried really hard to access the services. Our doctor tried really hard to get us in. We turned up three times in the accident and emergency department trying to skip the waiting list for CAMHS. The resources are not there.

I would be very slow to recommend to anybody that they go through the HSE with their children's mental health. I would tell them to beg, borrow and steal to get the money to go private, to pay a counsellor because they are gambling with their child's life if they go through this system. The child might come out alive or he or she might not. That is the reality of things for parents. It just should not be happening in this day and age. It is an absolute disgrace. We give out about waiting lists everywhere but people are going to die. It is down to a flip of a coin whether a child makes it out of it.

I had no idea how bad things were. If I had not gone through it, I would think the other witnesses here were all exaggerating. I genuinely would think they were just looking for a bit of drama. We are all strong people. There are people who are not as strong as us who are visiting graves and that is reality. It is time that Ireland woke up and did something about this and stopped talking about it. Put in the measures. There are empty beds all over the country - start using them. Open them up and put staff in place so that children can come in.

We should not have to rely on charities or people's goodness and kindness of heart. I am going to Kilimanjaro on Monday for Pieta House. We have raised nearly €160,000. I am not saying this because of Senator Freeman. I am leaving my children for nearly two weeks. In my family and my home, we have raised enough money to save eight lives. I have raised over €8,000 because of people's goodness. I should not have to do that. I should not have to take unpaid charitable leave from my job to go out there to make sure that no family goes through this again. It is not fair and we should not be asking it. I should not be going cap in hand begging the people of my town to give money to save lives.