Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have a follow-up point. I thank our guests for coming in. I know that it is stressful for them to come here and describe the circumstances of their children's situations and what they have had to go through over the years. I thank them for doing that. I know that it is not easy.

The system Ms O’Mahony described works because it is proactive. It anticipates the needs of the child. It could, as she said, be replicated by the State, if the State were to anticipate and co-ordinate the different things and come at it from the parents’ and children’s perspectives and not its own perspective in the context of how matters have been organised historically. I work with Vicky Casserly in respect of children in hospital. Again, we try to anticipate things the child and parent need. For example, if parents are in a multidisciplinary situation, we seek to ensure that all of the appointments are on Mondays, instead of three or four different days over two weeks, in order that people to not have to fill their cars with petrol three or four times or make three or four different childcare arrangements. It involves thinking about matters from the perspective of the person who is using the service.

In that vein, I want to come back in very strongly on the points relating to CAMHS and medication. Our guests are experienced in dealing with the education system, the HSE and all of these different things. While I know all of those are very difficult matters, our guests have a level of knowledge of the system and their children. That is an impossible thing to replicate when it comes to medication and the pharmacology of medication and what that means when it comes to managing side effects and the child’s growth.

My son has very bad epilepsy. His medication was changed in April. We got a cancellation appointment with a neurologist tomorrow in Crumlin to go back and check that. I was just thinking about our guests when I left. My child has a neurological injury. He is getting a follow-up appointment. Our guests’ children have neurodiverse situations and they are also under medical supervision, albeit a different type, and their children, who are on medication, are not being supervised or followed up with in the same way.

I never do this, but I want to state my view on CAMHS and a system that allows that to happen. It is negligent beyond words. It is criminally negligent to put a child on mind-altering medication and fail to follow it up in an appropriate way, every six or 12 months over the period, and to fail to care about that child, not just proactively, but to make sure that it is done properly. I am sorry to be so strong about something, but I feel that this is something that is out of our guests’ hands and their control and I just want to make the point very strongly.