Professor Matthew Sadlier:

My honest opinion is that as long as we have the current system, the answer is infinity because we just will not do it. We can have as much time as we like. The problem with mental health services is, bizarrely, not finance. There is a huge amount of unpaid salaries every year because we cannot fill posts. There is this concept of throwing money at it and creating posts in various parts of the country, which would be fantastic, but when we advertise, no one applies. Every policy regarding the health service must involve talking to the service providers. The Government needs to talk to the IMO and to the Psychiatric Nurses Association, PNA, on the nursing side, who have not been consulted on this Bill at all. They comprise the largest group of staff within the mental health service but they were not consulted on Sharing the Vision. We are making up stuff. It is like "Field of Dreams" stuff - if we build it, they will come - but, in reality, people are not taking up posts and the further away we get from large urban centres, the harder it is to fill posts. When local services put in some sort of incentive in a desperate attempt to fill a post, and they pay a locum or something, the next thing is that it comes up in front of the Committee of Public Accounts and local services get their hand slapped for providing a service.

They are then scared to do that again, so we end up with this situation where we have a sectorisation of mental health services. Where I work in north Dublin we have seven sectors. If you are missing a psychologist in one sector that area of the population has no psychology. The service is down by 14%, but because of sectorisation one person gets nothing and the other people get a continuation of service. We have created a postcode lottery. We have created a difficult situation to recruit and employ staff. Time wise, I think we can be here forever. So long as we keep doing what we are doing and do not learn from our mistakes we will just keep having the same problems.