Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Good evening to the witnesses. I thank them for their presentations. When we talk about deprivation of liberty we instantly think of prison so I will address that issue first. We had representatives of the Irish Prison Service before the committee and they identified the fact that there were large numbers of people in our prisons with mental health issues, autism, and intellectual disabilities, although the total is not quantified. Those working in the service said they are not able to deal with it, although they do their best. I regularly talk to people within the Prison Service who highlight shortages in the staff needed, including in psychology, psychiatry and so on. I made the point to them, and they agreed, that if the supports existed in the community these people would not be in our prison system. That is not the place they should be.

As the witnesses have outlined, deprivation of liberty is not just about being in prison. It is also about people being put into residential units or psychiatric wards in hospitals without their consent. I have also come across cases where people have requested psychiatric care but the hospital is trying to discharge them before they are ready. That is another issue, not to mention the lack of housing and the lack of mental health and disability supports in the community. When we take the helicopter view we see that we do not have the staff needed for disability teams and mental health teams on the ground. Why do we not have the staff? Part of it is housing. Qualified staff are going abroad because they cannot afford to live here and then those that are left cannot cope with the demand on their services. We are open to suggestions here but a huge amount of planning is needed. We need to take a much broader view because everything is interconnected.

Where do we start in addressing this because it has gotten so bad? Our prisons are overcrowded, as the professor identified earlier, but so many of the people in prison should not be there.

If supports were put into communities that have been deprived over generations, where there is intergenerational unemployment and lack of supports, we could avoid a lot of expenditure at the end when people end up in prison because they do not have supports. Where would we start? The lack of legislation in this area was mentioned. I am also aware that the State will be in front of the UN committee next year. It will be very critical of the lack of proper legislation in this area for dealing with so many of our issues, even recognising that mental health issues are a disability and need to be treated in that way and comes under the UNCRPD.

On the assisted decision-making Act, a remark was made recently in the committee that wardship has ended. There are three years for people to come out of wardship, yet the response has been very slow and possibly because options are not available, the cost is prohibitive or people do not know enough about the procedures. There are a lot of issues. Where do we start to address them?