Ms Susan Clyne:

I might come in there and I am sure the representatives of the IHCA will also have plenty to say on this topic. I do not think anybody in the profession is surprised at what has happened in CAMHS, and nor should anybody in the HSE or the Department of Health have been surprised. It is absolutely a system failure, and the rush to conducting an audit to find somebody to blame or to hold someone accountable will not address that system failure.

There is no easy solution to this and it may well be replicated across not just mental health services, but other services as well.

There has been a decade of austerity in the health service. There has been much longer than a decade of inattention to mental health services. Therefore, mental health services got it on the double,

We are incapable, as a public health service, of attracting people to work in it. That is not just consultants. It is across the board and across all services. We ask people to come into working environments that are extraordinarily stressful. I do not think there is a professional body now that represents anybody in the health service that is not saying that all healthcare staff are suffering from stress and burnout. The answer will be to do a bit of baking or yoga at the weekend.

We are putting people under enormous pressure. We are not funding services appropriately. We are letting services be delivered when we know that they are inadequate and have a lack of supervision. There is an issue with the lack of a consultant being there in the delivery of health services and in psychiatry and CAMHS. Consultant colleagues form Wexford have spoken very eloquently about the difficulties of CAMHS services and the interaction and community within the acute services. I am very sorry to say that we are not shocked. It is 100% a systems failure.