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

I thank Ms Curtis for attending.

This has been going on for a long time. What we have dealt with is only part of the file on Owenacurra. There are also parliamentary questions and you name it, not to mention the petititons.

Ms Curtis is right. She mentioned suicides. Between 2000 and 2002, there were 69 suicides in east Cork. There were women aged 63, 54 and 33, and the rest were all male. That indicates the need. There was a 22-bed system, with 20 full-time beds and the two short-term-stay beds. It is a question of the associated services. Ms Curtis mentioned that the Owenacurra Centre is bang in the centre of the town. There is a doctor across the road, a barracks on one side and a dentist on another side. The community hospital is nearby and there is access to the market. It is 50 yards to the main street. Despite this, the HSE wants the location to be St. Stephen's, the old lunatic asylum. It is in the middle of nowhere in a green field and has dormitory-style accommodation.

We have had arguments and heated debates with the HSE on this time and again. The building we are talking about is more compliant than any of the others that patients are being put into. What is happening is like taking people from a hotel and putting them into a tent. I have raised this with so many committees. I thank the Committee of Public Accounts, the Joint Sub-Committee on Mental Health, this committee and the Joint Committee on Health. I have written to the European Ombudsman twice about this matter but, unfortunately, it is not under its remit. I raised it with the European Ombudsman here some weeks ago. I am like a child waiting for a birthday card in that I know it is coming in the post but I do not know how much money is in it. I have written to the European Court of Human Rights about this also but it normally takes six to seven months even to get a response.

Ms Curtis and others will be very familiar with our toing and froing. I am referring to the last HSE board for Cork and Kerry. I raised the concerns with its representatives here at a committee meeting. It was not to score points as we are representing people, including families, here. What really struck me was that there was very little communication with family members and residents. The latter are not patients but residents because they have been in the accommodation for so long and have been so happy there. There was to be consultation. The most worrying thing about it was that when I raised the word "coercion" with the HSE representatives, who were sitting opposite me, they would not accept the word.

Let me quote the minutes of one of the most recent meetings, that of 8 February 2023. That was two years on and with a board. I highlighted the document in my favourite colour, pink.

It states:

The Committee raised concerns regarding placements to St Stephen’s Hospital, Glanmire and St Catherine’s Ward in St Finbarr’s Hospital Cork as these centres had received lower Mental Health Commission inspection compliance ratings than the Owenacurra Centre.

This is two years on, after meeting them. We are saying that we hate to say we told you so but we told you so. It continues:

Concerns were expressed that these environments are congregated settings that are campus based, isolated, away from the community in contravention of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, [we should not even be here talking about this now] Government policy and HSE policy as set out in Time to Move on from Congregated Settings - A Strategy for Community Inclusion.

They have actually worked against it. I had the honour to sit on the Committee on the Future of Healthcare which produced the Sláintecare report. You might as well wipe your backside with it because they have done the complete opposite.

Here is another interesting part from the minutes:

Some members of the Committee expressed dissatisfaction with the need to transfer the residents away from the Midleton area contrary to their expressed wishes.

It seems to me that if it is "contrary to their expressed wishes", that is coercion. They did not want to go and they moved them.

We will hear again from the St. Brigid's campaign in Tipperary. I read a lot and I can guarantee - I have said it here on record previously - we will have a similar case in Portlaoise as well. If one goes back to the first set of witnesses here, the HSE blamed the Mental Health Commission. The Mental Health Commission is the snagger who comes in to finalise a building and he tells you what is wrong with it, or the NCT inspector who tells you want is wrong with it. You fix it, it works and it passes the test. All the HIQA reports I have read so far on similar places to this state that the building is not fit for purpose. It is not fit for purpose because the proprietor did not follow the rules of the ganger man or the NCT inspector but blamed everybody else. To whose detriment is it? It is to that of the people in the community.

On the biggest loss in this, Ms Curtis is correct that there should be 30 or 33 beds per 900,000 of population or something like that. It should be a pilot project. We are losing a fully integrated working system because of the incompetence of management within the HSE. We have gone through reams and reams of things, such as boilers and alarms, that were supposed to be fixed and they were totally ignored. I am glad to be in here with the rest of the members because we will be back in here again after the recess.

I am well aware there is a new board there and I welcome it because it is engaging. I hope they will not be led astray between now and the time we get them back in in September.

I want to return to the associated services, especially the respite. They closed that with a 26-person waiting list for short-term respite. Short-term respite is for bloods, chiropody and dentistry. It also gives respite to the families. That is gone. We also have local community mental health services there. I think that has gone into the atmosphere with the Japanese balloon that they blew up or something, because we have seen nothing of it.

My frustration here is that the last time I wrote it was to the European Ombudsman. They told me to go back to HIQA, HIQA told me to go back to the HSE and the HSE told me to go back to the Mental Health Commission. I went back to the Minister and I ask the Minister where am I going and the Minister could not tell me. That is a frustrating story when families are at risk. This is why I want to get it on the record.

The fact is we need people like all the witnesses who are in this room today. They should not be afraid. They should not take intimidation. If they are not 100% sure, they should question it. If they do not get a response, they should come to us, we will question it and they can see how difficult it is for us.

Somebody has to take responsibility. The problem is we do not have oversight within the HSE as an entity and it can do what it likes. Sorry, have I run out of time?