Mr. Niall Mulligan:

To add to that, and thinking about what happens next and the potential impacts, we, as an organisation, and community groups know the impact of recession on the general population and on people's mental health and of people beginning to fall into poverty and everything that goes with that, including facing unemployment and long-term unemployment, so that will definitely be a concern. Other issues that have come up during the pandemic are an obvious increase in domestic violence and the impact that will have, and addiction, in particular alcohol use. How many people's alcohol intake has increased over the past 18 months? What will be the long-term impact of that on those individuals? We will probably only see that beginning to emerge over the next 18 months or two years, although we do not know for definite.

These are some of the things the Samaritans, as an organisation, is concerned about. We will probably see those stories coming through in regard to the helpline, so we will have to keep a close eye on that and on our responses to that as an organisation but also in terms of conversations with others. It is going to be a rocky road ahead in regard to mental health.

One of the positives that has come out of it is that the conversations are quite open, certainly more open in regard to mental health. We would call on mental health to be one of the key priorities, if not the priority, of Government going forward, and of everything that goes with that in terms of resources and so forth, which were mentioned. There is a kind of excitement about coming out of the restrictions but there is a concern around that also. Potentially we will see other areas emerge.