Mr. Bernard Gloster:

I thank the Senator for the question and for her good wishes. Only yesterday, I met the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Deputy Butler, who has specific responsibility for mental health, and had a very detailed discussion with her about it. Again, it is probably too easy and too glib for someone like me to say that it is high on my priorities but I can absolutely assure the Senator that it is. I am on the record saying that but also on what I have been attempting to do with it. We have a number of significant challenges. We are now into a new policy framework but when the previous policy, A Vision for Change, was established, it was a very good policy. Like any policy, implementation was part of the problem. It never got to the full implementation so the support systems for mental health, particularly in the community and for people with enduring mental health issues, did not materialise to the extent that they could have. Rehabilitation and recovery models were not as developed and everything crystallised around the acute inpatient units where people got delayed. Essentially, some of those beds became quasi-long-stay beds. That is the kind of challenge on the mental illness side. On the positive side of that, the development of community teams and approaches has been quite significant. Investments in counselling and in primary care counselling are very significant. We have to move beyond the issue of mental illness and the parameters of the mental health Act to talk about mental health well-being. Tomorrow or Friday, I will visit the Jigsaw service in Thurles in County Tipperary which is now established across the country. The Minister of State quite rightly said yesterday that we need to move away from talking about child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, specifically and only CAMHS. CAMHS is important but we also need to talk about the mental well-being of the youth population and that of the general population. Certainly, from my perspective, we have to plan for, and contemplate on, building in capacity for things like talk therapy and other supports into all of our primary care and other services. We should assume that a greater number of people - in fact the majority of people at some point in their lives - will require some support or attention towards their mental well-being and that in itself may assist in the sharper end of mental illness. It is something that the Senator quite rightly says is contributing to so many other factors and challenges for people. Very often it is at the heart of things. It is a very priority and we have significant investment in it. One of our problems is that we often cannot spend the money in mental health services because of the challenges of recruiting the right people and retaining them.