Mr. Ian Power:

I thank Deputy Murphy. In response to his frustration as to there being a lot of talk but where are we going, in our discussion today we should not lose focus on the root causes of mental health issues, especially in how they affect certain vulnerable communities. The core of it is that mental health is a social justice issue. The single most impactful factor in a person's holistic health is how much societal oppression and discrimination that person or group experiences. This might be as regards young people in care, as the Deputy has described, or people who are experiencing socio-economic discrimination, racism, as already discussed, people who are LGBTI+, gender-based discrimination, or emotional, sexual or physical violence and neglect. These are all social factors and root causes that we need to understand. These lead to the traumatic brain-body responses that can cause significant mental health difficulties. We should not forget about those root causes when we are talking about many of the symptoms and different issues we have discussed this morning.

As to the general point about action, I cannot overstress the point about the Pathfinder mental health initiative, for instance. As we have discussed and based on that point that I have just made, mental health is cross-cutting. It is not just the purview of the Department of Children and Youth Affairs, or the Department of Health, it has as much to do with housing as with health. We should establish this unit to be able to co-ordinate Government policy effectively across all Departments as suggested by the Pathfinder initiative and its proposed unit. It has the support all of the Secretaries General from each of those three main sponsor Departments and the Ministers have signed off on it. It is still, however, being looked into. We need the urgency to establish that type of model of policy-making to be able to drive some of the changes that the Deputy would like to see in the question that he asked.