Ms Joanna Curtis:

I would like to see beds in each of the three towns, that is, Cobh, Midleton and Youghal. Everybody is talking about health provision. It is drifting away from the individual person. If we have a mental health crisis, it involves primary school children and teenagers. We know that the farming community has mental health problems, as do the elderly, who have serious issues with loneliness. We will face further mental health issues now. There is an elderly crisis and certainly a mental health crisis, with financial problems, the climate - everything. It is affecting everybody. Jobs are not secure. We need a brand-new system or person for every single individual. I do not know why we cannot have a discussion with the HSE as a citizens' health forum with all the local counsellors. The person who wrote my presentation is a psychologist and a counsellor. Why can we not sit down now in local areas? It needs to be local; it must not be back to this institution-based health service. We cannot put people on sites like that.

Going back to A Vision for Change, if we are to go along with people-based, community-based care with the practitioners, while we have a say, why can we not have an open discussion? Why has the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, not come down? We have been visited by Senator Frances Black and Deputy Neasa Hourigan. Certain people have come down and discussed this, but this committee is the only committee we can approach now. The petitions committee is our only chance. We do not have anywhere else to go. We want to open up a dialogue with any committee, Member of the Oireachtas or member of the HSE to sit down and talk to us about what Midleton needs and what 100,000 people in east Cork need. We are asking them to come and talk to us. We have the people willing to talk and to show what the needs are in our community. Certainly, those people in the Owenacurra Centre were really valuable to us. I cannot get that message across to the committee enough. They were valued members of our community. Our community looked after them. They were in the centre of our community, with their families nearby. We must never forget the people who looked after them, the staff. They are local people who knew the families. That is on a human level. Could we not get back to individual care in the elderly centres and in palliative care, in which I have worked? In every community we need facilities to look after our own, truly.