Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail)

I thank the Deputy for his question and for the way he put it because it is a very difficult situation. We are seeing increasing numbers of presentations of young people, people with dual addictions, such as drugs and alcohol, they might have a dual diagnosis, or they might be psychotic. Over the past five years we have been trying to grow community supports and we have been successful.

As I referred to earlier in reply to Deputy Clarke, we now have Solace cafés, which used to be called crisis cafes. There is one in Galway immediately across the road from University Hospital Galway. I opened that three years ago. Since then there has been an 18% reduction in presentations to the accident and emergency department. People do not just rock up to the café. A family member or a doctor makes a referral to the facility, which opens out of hours from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. It was the brainchild of Dr. Amanda Burke, who was the clinical lead for mental health for CAMHS. These are proving to work well. We opened one recently in Cork on Sullivan's Quay. Cork Mental Health Organisation is the stakeholder. It has a premises and this is working well. We are trying to roll these out across the country. We are trying to give people an alternative.

We also have crisis resolution teams. We have five in place across the country and are trying to build on that. These crisis resolution teams work Thursday to Monday from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. That is the time when people can be in a real crisis. GPs know that they can refer their patient to their local crisis resolution team. These are important. Another initiative that has been a game-changer is in Limerick and is called the Community Access Support Team, CAST. It is a pilot between the Department of Justice, An Garda Síochána and the Department of Health. The figures from it are really good. When there is a crisis situation and the emergency services are called, a car and a specialist mental health clinical nurse will travel with the ambulance. We have rolled out this pilot and we have put a lot of work into this pilot. I met with clinicians from North America and Northern Ireland where this initiative is working. This is working really well. We want to embedded this in Limerick first. All credit goes to superintendent Andrew Lacey who led this. It was his perspective and it has worked really well. This tries to support people before they need to get to the emergency department.

We are pleased with this year's figures from the National Office for Suicide Prevention. Following a peak during the recession in 2012, the rate of death by suicide has been decreasing. The rate in 2000 was 12.9 deaths per 100,000 people. The rate this year is 9 per 100,000. That is a decrease of over 25% over the past 17 or 18 years. However, each death by suicide is one too many. We all know that and the effect that it has.

Last week I launched SpunOut's new navigator tool. I secured €500,000 in funding in 2024 and we partnered with SpunOut to develop the navigator tool. It is for people between the ages of 14 and 34. It was devised by 900 young people and is user friendly. You type in "SpunOut/navigatortool" and there are three simple questions to be answered. I invite people to download it to their phone and try it. It leads immediately to a text portal where you can get an immediate answer if you are in distress. A young or a not-so-young person who is in distress on a Friday or Saturday night will get a response through this. It took longer to put in place than I would have liked but it is so much more than what I envisaged. It is evidence-based. It was devised by young people for young people. There is a backup to it and funding will be provided every year for the team. While we are delivering more community supports such as discovery and recovery colleges for people in mental health distress, we do have one problem, which I have spoken about a lot. We have a problem trying to encourage men of all ages to access supports. Of the people who died by suicide in recent years, 80% were male. We also know that two thirds of all counselling supports are accessed by women. There is a whole cohort of men out there who do not access supports.

Anecdotal figures will prove – the Department does not like me saying this because they are anecdotal – that one third of all men who die by suicide never accessed any support of any type. I have €2 million in additional funding this year, and this is targeting men only for counselling supports. These are men who may not have a medical card and cannot afford to apply for counselling. We will shortly roll out free counselling supports for men across all GPs. It will involve immediate contact by phone and users will get support for up to eight phone calls. If they need to meet somebody face to face after that, they will. We are doing a lot in this area. The more we talk about mental health, especially for men, the better. I thank the Deputy for all his work on this issue.