Dr. Niall Muldoon:

On mental health, I flagged the concept of the pathfinder project, which arose as an idea in the Civil Service renewal plan of 2014 because it was known it was important to co-ordinate Departments and to do things better. The Civil Service wanted to prove that could be done. It chose mental health as the most important area to pilot in 2014. It was reiterated in the national youth task force recommendations in December 2017 as a top priority for the Government at that stage. I wrote to four Ministers, namely, the Ministers for Public Expenditure and Reform, Health, Education and Skills, and Children and Youth Affairs, about the project. They all agreed it was a Government policy, that they wanted to make it happen and that it was important to do, but the co-ordination has not yet happened. My understanding is there is a proposal before the Office of the Attorney General to examine how it will happen.

Nevertheless, I urge the committee, as Members of the Oireachtas, to try to push the matter forward, even on an administrative basis, while the legislation is being sorted out. People in the Departments of Children and Youth Affairs, Education and Skills, and Health will sit in the same room and try to smooth the way for the poor child and parents trying to find mental health access. If a child is referred by a teacher as a result of a mental health issue, there should not be three or ten different doors to knock on. The pathfinder project is the start of a possible solution to inter-agency co-operation, to take responsibility, spread it across the Departments and recognise that the child is the focus of all our actions, not a sidebar to who is in charge of what. If the committee could exert pressure or authority on making that happen before the next election, in order that the pathfinder project will be established and secure, irrespective of who is in government in the future, it would go some way towards helping children. While it will not be the answer to everything, if there are people from three Departments in a room saying they have control or responsibility, we will see something.

I earlier researched a simple example of Government units not co-ordinating. Tusla regionally manages 17 sections, the HSE has nine community healthcare organisations, while the Garda restructured approximately three weeks ago from 28 to 19 divisions. If I ask someone to co-ordinate among the Garda, the HSE and Tusla, there could be three managers together but they may say they need two from one county, one from another or there may be disagreement over who is in charge of which division because they are based in different areas. Children fall between such cracks. We could easily get the divisions of the Garda, the HSE and Tusla to be the same, which would mean the manager in charge of each section would have the same geography. Such simple steps could be examined by the Government as a whole to see whether they could be taken. It would mean there would not be four or five managers, some of whom may not show up to a meeting because they consider it to be a different area from their own. Such simple matters could be examined at the highest level. If there is to be restructuring in any event, why have people not considered them? The pathfinder project is the same. We can bring people with a level of authority into the same room and say we will need to spread the workload. From a mental health point of view, that is one of the highest level areas on which we can work.

On the failure to recruit, there are areas to examine. It is the worst possible recruitment area at this stage and we need to take a different approach to it. I suggest-----