Ms Ber Grogan:

I am obviously new with Mental Health Reform. This is week six and I hope I am doing it justice with the bits and pieces that I am talking about.

One of the things I am working on is looking at the heads of the Bill to amend of the Mental Health Act 2001. Obviously, it is a long-awaited amendment of the Mental Health Act to bring it into compliance with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, which we ratified in 2018, and with human rights law. It has been functioning outside of human rights legislation for a long time.

The heads of the Bill are interesting, but I suppose one of the things we were looking at is that the 2015 expert group's 165 recommendations were brought forward prior to the ratification of the UNCRPD. We can speak about things being person-centred, individual care plans and listening to the person but there has to be a whole culture change in moving away from the biomedical models and looking at people. There is a huge opportunity now for the Oireachtas with the amendment Bill. We had the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act in 2015. Not all of that has been commenced. There was the Mental Health (Amendment) Act 2018 on the definition of "voluntary patients". That has not been commenced either. When we talk about reforming, we mean putting it into action.