Ms Audry Deane:

We are getting a high volume of research coming in continually. It is excellent. It is all very new but it is important. The big message that Mental Health Reform wants to get across to the committee is that specific groups are definitely more vulnerable to the impact and the results of the pandemic. Specific and targeted interventions are needed. In our current situation, with how the mental health system is so poorly fit for purpose, there is no way around this. We need a lot of funding and we need to ensure the funding goes into the front-line services to offer targeted, preventative interventions.

We have touched on the groups that are extremely vulnerable, and there are quite a lot of them. It will be very clear to Deputy Ward that many of these are people who have poor access to the social determinants of mental and physical health - to use the jargon. In ordinary language, this means people who cannot access proper housing, education, jobs, communication, and amenities. Their children cannot play anywhere. The list is endless but I do not have the time to go into it in detail. These people, and especially those in precarious employment situations, are very exposed to the virus.

An interesting group is healthcare front-line workers, and nurses and midwives in particular. The CSO has done an interesting piece of work that matched up census 2016 data on occupations with the total number 69,000 cases of Covid in the March to November period of last year. The CSO found that despite being only 2% of the full total of the workforce, nurses and midwives made up 6% of all cases of Covid.

There are also people with pre-existing mental health difficulties. They suffer for two reasons. First, there is the pandemic and the restrictions, which have impacted very obviously on that group and disimproved their mental health status. As a cohort, they are also more likely to get infected with Covid-19. This is a double whammy, if one wants to put it like that.

Ms Ansbro has already referred to women as a vulnerable group, and particularly women in part-time, precarious employment. They have been impacted very badly by Covid. A survey by the National Women's Council tells us that many women have been impacted hugely by caring responsibilities, which have increased since the pandemic, with 55% having less time to concentrate on their own mental health.

We could not ignore the cohort of youth aged 18 to 35. This group has been hugely impacted by the pandemic for a variety of reasons. As other speakers indicated, specific and particularly marginalised and vulnerable groups include people with a dual diagnosis of addiction, those who are homeless and ethic minorities who live in precarious housing situations. The list is not endless but these are quite specific groups who will need quite specific and targeted interventions. We will need funding to get to grips with this.

As the HSE report published in February indicated, Mental Health Reform believes that our sector can be a partner in the future to reconfigure how mental health services are designed and delivered. We stand ready, on behalf of our 75 members, to work with the HSE to create targeted interventions that will allow people to access mental health services when they need them.