Professor Jim Lucey:

It is leadership. Leadership and culture are tightly linked. Without that leadership, it is hard to get someone to be heard saying that we have a huge health budget but we only spend €1 in every €20 on mental health and asking for the right balance of priorities for our investment. As a commission, we cannot influence or say those things because it is not our function. Our function is quite limited but a national lead, one would imagine, would be able to co-ordinate, lead and set the cultural tone. There would still be a difficulty in terms of the wide array of providers a committee member mentioned. There are now so many different complex players in this but a national lead, one would imagine, would be able to bring together those particular diverse voices and we would get coherence. A national lead, I think, would be able to lead a provider set, either within one organisation or a wider set of groups, towards a national standard that would be independently set and monitored. Now one would have governance. Governance, as the Senator will be aware, is a complex range of things.