Mr. Stephen Sheil:

I am grateful for the opportunity to come in on this. To speak to Deputy Clarke's point, Mental Health Reform was disappointed to see that the amendment on the prohibition on admitting children to adult psychiatric units was dismissed, as I think was mentioned earlier. To comply with the UNCRC, its concluding observations about Ireland repeatedly express concern about the issue. Most recently, it criticised the continued admission of children to adult psychiatric wards due to inadequate availability of child-specific mental health facilities, long waiting lists for services and insufficient out-of-hours mental health supports for children and adolescents. We strongly believe this amendment should have been brought forward, and we are disappointed to see it will not be. We realise the figure from last year is five children. Lots of figures have been mentioned today. As Professor Sadlier has said, every figure is made up of a person. We believe one person is too many, never mind five. The figure goes on for this year. We are not sure what it will be, but we believe it should be zero. We know it is difficult in practice to regulate for that. However, it should be best practice as we now have a chance to regulate for many decades to come.