Ms Ber Grogan:

I will. I thank the Deputy for his comments. I was delighted to see him still in his summer suit the other day in the Chamber. His point is excellent and it is why we have been calling for a national advocacy service for young people and adults in mental health services.

As the Deputy so rightly stated, there are parents who will stay in the accident and emergency units and who are constantly advocating for people. That is great for people who have supports. What about the people who do not have anyone to advocate for them? Perhaps their supports are in services which are provided by some of our member organisations. It is heartening to see that advocates are mentioned in the new heads of the Bill but this is talking about individuals. I would be interested to see if we will be drilling down more into that to say that this could be a support organisation because not everyone has an individual to advocate for them, particularly if one has enduring mental health issues. A national advocacy service is something that Mental Health Reform has been pushing for for a considerable period of time.

On the point of parents advocating for their children, I wanted to inform the committee that the Huntington's Disease Association of Ireland is one of our members. It got in touch with us today to tell us about a child in Mayo who has Huntington’s disease, who will be waiting two years to access the child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, and who has acute anxiety. We were talking earlier about the Eircode lottery but this is completely unacceptable. We know that there are more than 2,700 children are on waiting lists for CAMHS, with hundreds waiting more than a year. This is very dangerous. An advocacy service would help that, together with an independent complaints mechanism which does not exist at the moment.