Dr. Orla Kelleher:

I am a niece of one of the residents of the Owenacurra Centre in Midleton and I am here today to advocate on my aunt's behalf. It is not easy for families like mine to share our story publicly. With Anna's permission, I will share her experience of living in the Owenacurra Centre and what the service means to her and to families such as ours. I will also highlight some problems with the closure and the steps we would like the Committee on Public Petitions to take.

My aunt, Anna, has lived at the Owenacurra Centre for over 25 years. Before moving to the centre, Anna was a patient at Our Lady's Hospital in Cork where she was in a closed ward for several years. My aunt has struggled with significant and enduring mental health problems since her twenties.

Owenacurra Centre was set up in 1988. It is a multipurpose service for people with severe and enduring mental health illness. It has a town centre location.

It is next to SuperValu and the Midleton market and within walking distance of lots of amenities. This has been key to rehabilitation, community integration and quality of life for many residents, including my aunt. It really is a life-saving and transformative service. Life has not been easy for Anna but being at the Owenacurra Centre has given her a chance to live the best life she can. When Anna first arrived at the centre, she found communication with people difficult, she was reluctant to leave the building and she could not go out for a short drive in my mother's car. However, over several years of rehabilitation and with the dedicated support of the Owenacurra staff, Anna gradually found her feet and flourished in Midleton. As a family, we are terrified that any move away from the centre, and Midleton, could result in a serious deterioration in her mental health and well-being.

The Owenacurra Centre is the only HSE long-stay adult mental health facility in east Cork and our only mental health respite facility. The centre has a capacity of 28 placements and can accommodate up to 20 residents in single rooms. In June 2021, the HSE announced its plans close the centre by 31 October 2021. At that stage, there were 19 residents. After a campaign mounted by Friends of Owenacurra, which is a coalition of residents, family members, local representatives and members of the community, the closure has been temporarily postponed. The reason for pushing out the closure date was that the HSE has not been able to find suitable placements for all the residents. Delaying the closure has been cold comfort to residents and family members. We have been informed that the centre is definitely closing but we have no idea when it will happen.

The closure process is ongoing and some residents have already moved. The number of residents has now been reduced to 11. To date, my family has had three family consultations to discuss Anna's future. These discussions have raised more questions than answers and have only increased our anxiety and worry about her future. For example, in September 2021, it was suggested that she would be moved out of the area to St. Stephen's Hospital in Glanmire, which is an institutional setting in the countryside, away from her friends and community in Midleton. This suggestion was very distressing for our family. Anna spent years in a closed ward and now, after the progress she has made at Owenacurra, she is facing the prospect of being sent back to an institutional setting. In December 2021, there was a conversation about another out-of-area placement in a house in Carrigaline. However, the building did not have planning permission and the proposal has been subject to a number of objections from local residents. Most recently, there was a vague suggestion that the HSE would look for a house in Midleton but no property has been identified.

The whole process has taken a severe toll on Anna and on our family. For Anna, the past 12 months have been extremely difficult. She has expressed her clear wish to remain in Midleton at the Owenacurra Centre, which is her home. She has had to endure terror and fear that she is going to be made homeless. She has had to watch her fellow residents, many of them friends, being sent off to different places around the county. She has had no news about how they are settling into their new accommodation and she is worried about them.

The stated reason for the closure is that the premises is not fit for purpose and no amount of refurbishment could bring it to an acceptable standard. The proposed closure was not signalled by recent Mental Health Commission reports, despite briefings from HSE management and communications to residents strongly suggesting that the commission's concerns contributed in significant part to the closure decision. The decision stemmed from an internal building report by the HSE's maintenance department. That report did not provide evidence of a new building survey that could support such a claim. Independent asbestos and fire safety reports, carried out in 2019 and 2021, respectively, set out the works that were required on the premises. Neither report supported the claim that the building was beyond repair or could not be brought up to an acceptable standard.

Despite repeated HSE briefings suggesting otherwise, no independent report has supported the HSE's position that the Owenacurra building is beyond repair. A member of the Oireachtas health committee who is a qualified architect with a specialist expertise in healthcare buildings visited Owenacurra, studied the building reports, concluded there was no reason the building could not be renovated and suggested this could potentially be done section by section, with the reduced number of residents remaining on site. After a thorough examination of the closure rationale, including a site visit to the Owenacurra Centre and St. Stephen's Hospital for comparison, the health committee wrote to Minister of State at the Department of Health, Deputy Butler, in April calling for a reversal of the closure as a matter of urgency and stating that the committee considered the evidence produced by the HSE justifying the decision to be "unconvincing". The committee repeated this opinion in a more detailed follow-up letter to the CEO of the HSE, Mr. Paul Reid, and the Minister of State in May and in a referral to the HSE board in recent weeks.

I will sum up what families of residents and the Save Owenacurra Centre campaign are seeking. It is important to emphasise that the campaign is not just about current residents, including my aunt. It is primarily about them but it is also about the many other people in east Cork with severe mental illness who require placements of varying duration to attain a decent quality of life. The campaign is not just about a few vocal families holding out against the HSE's planned closure; it is about a broader regional need into the future for a very vulnerable group of people. Families and others involved in the campaign want the Oireachtas health committee's detailed refutation of the closure to be upheld by the HSE. We want to see the building issues addressed in a manner that is not so disruptive that it leads to an almost total cessation of services over many years.

We are appealing to the HSE board to intervene and direct the executive to overturn the closure decision. The board was set up with the aim of building public trust and confidence in the HSE. The experience of families and many other supporters is that a vital service is being removed in a manner that just does not stand up to scrutiny. There appears to be no accountability for this. No amount of evidence of the distress of residents and family members or arguments from Oireachtas committees is making any difference to these proposals. It is extremely difficult to have trust in the HSE as a result of this attempted closure and how it has been handled. We ask the Committee on Public Petitions to write to the HSE board to reinforce the health committee's recommendation that the decision to close the Owenacurra Centre be reversed.