Mr. John Meehan:

Deputy Neville raised the issue some weeks ago with my colleagues, Mr. Jim Ryan and Dr. Brendan Doody. There are two riverside patrols in Limerick. There is the Limerick Suicide Watch group and the Limerick Treaty Suicide Prevention group. In our supporting documents I see we have 22 resource officers for suicide prevention. Although we do not provide funding specifically to either of the groups in Limerick, there is a standing agreement that the voluntary patrols in Limerick city and county have reserved spaces for training on the applied suicide intervention skills training, ASIST, and safeTALK programmes. We support them in training and also in identifying with them local contact numbers in the event of needing assistance. Deputy Neville provided an example. There was a reaction to that and there was a follow-up, which we support.

We have 17 local actions plans for our resource officers around the country. The HSE has always been accused of having national strategies and launching and leaving them. Connecting for Life is the only strategy in Europe that has an action plan and local area plans. The demographics and needs in Limerick are a bit different from my own county in Donegal and different again to those in Dublin. The groups link in locally. We do not provide direct funding. However, we provide training and support to the volunteers. A third community crisis response team is based in west Limerick and it has plans to go national as well.