Ms Audry Deane:

Without hogging the discussion, I will say there is a huge piece of research coming out of Maynooth University, which is the Irish partner in the Covid-19 consortium in Ireland and the UK. It is doing massively valuable work. When it did its first review back in March 2020, which seems like a long time ago now, it found that there was already quite a high level of mental health difficulties in the general population, regardless of the impact that was to come in the intervening period. One can see that there are people out there who have not yet reached out and who are existing with some degree of mental health difficulty. There can be no doubt that if their mental health deteriorates and if the services continue as residually as they do in many cases, we will run into a serious problem.

There are, however, a lot of people out there who have been exceptionally resilient and who have not suffered. After the initial blip - the uncertainty, the fear, the huge anxiety and the stress - many people are actually coping very well. We in Mental Health Reform are not in the doom and gloom business. We value and celebrate people who survive, thrive and flourish in resilience. We want to make sure that everybody can do that. We will need appropriately funded mental health services, but 5.1% of the total health budget is not showing us that mental health has parity of esteem in the current status, as Deputy Ward will be aware. We ask our leaders to ensure that mental health services can do what they want to do, which they cannot do in the current climate.