Liam Quaide (Cork East, Social Democrats)

I want to come back to the St. Stephen's Hospital proposal for continuing care, rehabilitation and recovery, and a 50-bed service. Mr. Gloster mentioned the progress that has happened with the Owenacurra Centre. Two houses have been acquired in Midleton, which is brilliant. That rebuild is stalled but it is going through the planning process. My experience of that campaign, and that of some of my colleagues and families who were involved is that it was basically a sustained battering ram of negative publicity against HSE management that got us to this point. That is not how these things should be sorted out.

We had very compelling arguments from an ethical point of view and a service provision point of view in respect of mental health policy as to why removing all of those services from east Cork was wrong. There are objectively established reasons why the proposal in St. Stephen's is going to be not only very ethically questionable, and wrong in my view, but a massive misdirection of public money. There are places like Clonakilty and Cobh that do not have community residences for people with severe and enduring mental illness and because that money is now getting centralised into St. Stephen's Hospital, they will not have it into the future. There will be 50 residents there and while they might be living in nice bungalows on site, it is not in any way integrated into the community. All of the land around St. Stephen's is zoned for agricultural use. Across the road, it is zoned for light industry, which is actually an online warehouse. As I said, there is not even a footpath to the nearest service station, which is 1.7 km away. It goes against everything we have been doing in mental health services since at least the nineties, if not the eighties.

When I joined north Cork mental health services in 2013, many of my colleagues had been working for years, helping long-stay patients of St. Stephen's Hospital to move out into Kanturk, Newmarket and Mallow. This is actually a reversal of that trend.