Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Church, Ms Connolly and Ms Keane for coming before the committee this morning. The one beauty about these committees is that a lot more can be said and printed here than in any media or newspapers. It is a great opportunity to get the truth and the real stuff out there.

I will turn first to Barnardos with a question for Ms Connolly and Ms Keane. The opening statement showed there was an 82% increase in stress, a 50% increase in stress at home, and a 15% increase in substance use. This was all during the lockdown. The witnesses spoke about all of the options and the additional challenges resulting from the pandemic, such as funding. The last budget provided for a measly €24 million. I do not believe the €24 million will keep the services in the ticking over position, as they stand now. Ms Connolly and Ms Keane spoke about helping parents to engage with their children and children to engage with their parents. There is an old cliche, a problem shared is a problem halved. When it comes to mental health or anxiety, however, or anything on that scale, it is very difficult for the child to go to a parent because we are naturally a reactive society, unfortunately, so the problem shared is not a problem halved, it is a problem doubled. The first thing the parent does is to react. The child sees that and there is another reaction and then it escalates. Mr. Church said, and he is right, that the schoolteacher or the sports coach is normally the one who first picks up on this. Are the organisations facing major challenges in trying to get parents and children engaged? Obviously, there are additional issues there.

On the second one, in his opening statement Mr. Church said in the space of 11 months the society's services had listened to calls from nearly 250,000 children. I am actually lost for words. Nearly 250,000 children in the space of 11 months. That is in only one service. We have been trying to get this through to Governments over the years. Again, we are a reactive society. We will wait until there has been a tsunami of suicides and then we will say, "God, how did that happen?" or ask why is this or that broken, when we are hearing from the witnesses coming into the committee telling us about the issues and trying to resolve them and they are not being listened to. I found the following line stark since we are talking about children. We know in adults and maybe young adults it could be prevalent but the ISPCC had: "... over 600 contacts from children who spoke with us about suicide." "Suicide" is the full-stop word. It is the last one. You have gone beyond anxiety, social exclusion and stuff. That is very worrying.

I am very interested in the society's e-therapeutic support programme because we have a different generation there now. However, again many of these people do not have broadband, the Internet or computers to be able to get that. The other line was, "... 26 contacts each week from children and young people who tell us they feel actively suicidal, have suicidal thoughts and feelings, or have previously attempted suicide." That is 26 per week. I am not going to do the maths now but we have been talking about mental health and mental health services for a very long time. What seems to be coming up all the time is the lack of services. Then when you go to whoever is in power, they tell us of the lack of resources and that they cannot get staff. We had it here two or maybe three years ago when 114 assistant psychiatrists were promised. They did step up to the mark and did hire them but they were not doing psychiatry, they were doing paperwork. There is a massive breakdown within the system.

I do not want to come across as always being negative because there are people in the front line here who are absolutely amazing but it is about how we pull together all the supports to support the likes of Barnardo's, the ISPCC or any of the other NGO groups. It is heartbreaking for us listening to this. You can imagine the stress on families. I have seen it in my own family and I even struggled with it during Covid. We are used to being out and about and meeting people but I was actually struggling from social anxiety and was trying to condition myself back into getting out and being confident around people. However, thinking of the present organisations and children who are most vulnerable, it really hurts me when I hear these statements.

I have two questions. Do the witnesses agree that between here and, say, next May we will see a tsunami of mental health issues coming to their services? It is a weird one. May is normally the highest factor month for suicides. It is not in the dark, grey days of December or January but the start of summer, which is crazy.

I asked my second question at the last meeting. There was €24 million and apparently a €10 million one-off payment to be invested in new mental health services this year. We in Sinn Féin put forward a package of more than €113 million, which would have been the largest in the history of the State. That shows who we are serious about and who listens to people. It is a difficult question the witnesses may not be able to answer on the budget for this. I think Mr. Church mentioned the WHO and investing 10% or 12%, whereas I would say we are investing less than 5% in mental health services. It is not always about money because throwing money at the problem will not fix it. We have to go back to the start and look at salaries, the training for psychiatrists, psychologists and so forth. That takes years and because the system is so toxic it is not being fully supported. Those who have the empathy to work in those services lose faith because they do not have their own supports and see children falling through the cracks. Is it therefore a matter of going back to the start and saying we need to streamlines services, we need to streamline training, we need supports to be put in place and we need proper budgets ringfenced every year? Also, as the Chair will be aware, we are talking about all the stress and anxiety of Covid and so on and we are talking about investing in mental health services, yet we have the Owenacurra Centre, in my own town of Midleton, that has never had Covid, has never had a suicide and because of lack of investment from the HSE in the maintenance of the building it is going to shut down that service in the middle of a pandemic. It is ludicrous.

Do the witnesses understand what I am saying when I refer to supports and trying to get people to work together? It is a lot to take in but I would love to hear the opinion of the the witnesses on it. It is not a quiz or a competition. I just need their honest opinions because we can take it back. When you are in committees like this, at least the public outside are hearing the truth and hearing it from the witnesses who are in here. I do not think many people would have been aware that the organisations' services have been under so much stress during Covid and how well they have coped with it. I do not see any of them throwing the rattle out of the pram, if they know what I mean. They have kept their decorum. However, we also need to know how well they are prepared going into the future with this trend, which I suspect will increase in the next couple of months, and how they will cope with it.