Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Dr. McDaid and Ms Mitchell from Mental Health Reform for all the work they have done. It has been a wonderful advantage for members to work with them. I commend everybody involved.

Twelve years have passed and we still have not come up with a plan. Twelve years ago, we should have been talking about training nurses and specialists, signing them up and giving them contracts even before they were qualified, thereby covering retention. In that period of 12 years we had the opportunity and we are still looking at the demographics of areas where accommodation is more expensive. We could have indexed linked wages and structures to that. The HSE is wasting so much money that perhaps it could have bought a couple of apartments and put the nurses into them, like the NHS does.

I wrote a synopsis from July 2017 to 2018 on the media coverage of the mental health services and how bad they are. Regardless of how much we talk about this, the days of talking about it must stop if we must start from scratch. It is now a couple of weeks before the summer recess and we should be coming back with a final report stating this is our plan as to what should be done and to start now. The synopsis makes for harrowing reading. Children with mental health issues are presenting at emergency departments, there are chronic shortages in mental health, more than 2,400 children are waiting for child mental health services and children are waiting 15 months to see a psychologist. According to the Ombudsman for Children, we are not delivering on the promises we made and it was noted that suicide claimed 70 schoolchildren in one year. Moreover, it has been reported that suicidal children face long waits to see specialist psychiatrists and that the ombudsman has called for increased mental health funding. Finally, while referring to being really burned out, a child psychiatrist resigned as conditions were not fit.

That is a brief synopsis of where we have come in one year in the mental health services. This gives members a broad picture how bad the situation is. No matter how much we talk about this, the days of talking have to stop. We talk about money and ring-fencing but we have to take the realistic approach. We have looked at the budgets over the years, including the additional so-called €35 million or perhaps €15 million with an imaginary €20 million on top that could not be spent. As the money could not be spent on recruitment, it was not spent. We should be ring-fencing this. The money that is being spent in the budgets now is only bringing us to a flat level as to where we should be. It has been well documented that we are short approximately 500 staff members in the mental health service as it stands and it will cost many millions to bring our staffing level to where it should be. We need an additional 500 staff members to bring us to what was envisaged in A Vision for Charge and we still would not have sufficient staff for the future needs. We need to think in terms of forward planning because within the next five years, we will lose 1,700 staff within the mental health service due to retirement and whatever. I love the honesty being expressed on the issue. I appeal to the two Ministers responsible to set out a realistic plan. If they will not invest in this plan, then as a Cork man once said, "Fail to prepare, prepare to fail." That is what we are looking at in the mental health services. I have no criticism of Mental Health Reform. We are not here to criticise. We praise people at times but inclusion and multidisciplinary teams get my goat at times because nobody knows how many are on each CAMHS team. It is like going out to a GAA match with 15 on one side and nine on the other and they are calling it two perfect teams. It does not work. I think the Government has to look at that. I do not care what way it is done; perhaps a pilot scheme in an area of high rates of suicide. We should be investing in these demographic areas and starting the pilot projects. The approach must be broad.

As an all-party Oireachtas committee, we genuinely get on most of the time but I appeal to the members of other parties to go back and set a marker, a map and a route to run both a proper health service and a proper mental health service. It goes back to plan A, that is, let us start by investing in training, by treating the people who work in the system with dignity and respect and let us not train our staff for export but to make them proud of the system. We need to become inclusive in order that regardless of whether one is a psychotherapist, a psychologist, engaged in art therapy and so on, one is part of the full team. We need to commit to building the full team. We must make the cake with all the ingredients that are listed on the bottom of the box because if one does not have all the ingredients, one will not come out with the cake one wanted to make in the first place.