Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail)

I apologise for being late. The Senate was sitting so that delayed me. I thank the witnesses for their opening statements and for the work they do. This trauma is a real characteristic of the Irish psyche, from the Famine, occupation, the Civil War, economic depressions and social repression. One of the witnesses included a statistic that 50% of every person had at least one traumatic experience in their childhood and many more have multiple ones. Often it has become so normalised and accepted that individuals do not recognise the trauma incidents as trauma. I was really heartened to hear the witnesses’ contributions. It was very encouraging to hear Dr. O’Shea recognise and acknowledge - and it is important to recognise and acknowledge - the progress that has been made and is being made. It is being made by people in the witnesses’ professions and in their sector. It is professionals like them taking their skills and expertise to improve our addiction services, improve counselling and improve the resources. The model Ms O’Reilly described is the holistic model that is required. Humans are not one-dimensional. We do not have one problem. It is all connected and this is essential.

Our committee wants to bring forward recommendations that will support the witnesses and their sector to further develop to meet the needs adequately. I would like to ask each of them to talk about prevention for a moment and tell me what they would do if they had a blue-sky opportunity to put in place their priorities for preventative action. One of them mentioned a public health campaign about trauma, but what would that look like? Is that a public health campaign about resilience, wellness or respect, dignity and empathy? I would like their views on prevention because already we all recognise there is an inadequate percentage of the budget – the almost €30 billion that will be spent this year on health – for mental health and addiction and we obviously want to correct that. A big part of it also has to be a very significant increase in funding for prevention as an investment in people’s health and wellness. I would appreciate it if each of the witnesses could give me their views on that. Dr. O’Shea might like to go first.